Bird

Bird PDF Author: Chuck Haddix
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252095170
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Saxophone virtuoso Charlie "Bird" Parker began playing professionally in his early teens, became a heroin addict at 16, changed the course of music, and then died when only 34 years old. His friend Robert Reisner observed, "Parker, in the brief span of his life, crowded more living into it than any other human being." Like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane, he was a transitional composer and improviser who ushered in a new era of jazz by pioneering bebop and influenced subsequent generations of musicians. Meticulously researched and written, Bird: The Life and Music of Charlie Parker tells the story of his life, music, and career. This new biography artfully weaves together firsthand accounts from those who knew him with new information about his life and career to create a compelling narrative portrait of a tragic genius. While other books about Parker have focused primarily on his music and recordings, this portrait reveals the troubled man behind the music, illustrating how his addictions and struggles with mental health affected his life and career. He was alternatively generous and miserly; a loving husband and father at home but an incorrigible philanderer on the road; and a chronic addict who lectured younger musicians about the dangers of drugs. Above all he was a musician, who overcame humiliation, disappointment, and a life-threatening car wreck to take wing as Bird, a brilliant improviser and composer. With in-depth research into previously overlooked sources and illustrated with several never-before-seen images, Bird: The Life and Music of Charlie Parker corrects much of the misinformation and myth about one of the most influential musicians of the twentieth century.

Bird

Bird PDF Author: Chuck Haddix
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252095170
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Get Book Here

Book Description
Saxophone virtuoso Charlie "Bird" Parker began playing professionally in his early teens, became a heroin addict at 16, changed the course of music, and then died when only 34 years old. His friend Robert Reisner observed, "Parker, in the brief span of his life, crowded more living into it than any other human being." Like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane, he was a transitional composer and improviser who ushered in a new era of jazz by pioneering bebop and influenced subsequent generations of musicians. Meticulously researched and written, Bird: The Life and Music of Charlie Parker tells the story of his life, music, and career. This new biography artfully weaves together firsthand accounts from those who knew him with new information about his life and career to create a compelling narrative portrait of a tragic genius. While other books about Parker have focused primarily on his music and recordings, this portrait reveals the troubled man behind the music, illustrating how his addictions and struggles with mental health affected his life and career. He was alternatively generous and miserly; a loving husband and father at home but an incorrigible philanderer on the road; and a chronic addict who lectured younger musicians about the dangers of drugs. Above all he was a musician, who overcame humiliation, disappointment, and a life-threatening car wreck to take wing as Bird, a brilliant improviser and composer. With in-depth research into previously overlooked sources and illustrated with several never-before-seen images, Bird: The Life and Music of Charlie Parker corrects much of the misinformation and myth about one of the most influential musicians of the twentieth century.

Charlie Parker

Charlie Parker PDF Author: Carl Woideck
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472037897
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
Saxophonist Charlie Parker (1920-1955) was one of the most innovative and influential jazz musicians of any era. As one of the architects of modern jazz (often called "bebop"), Charlie Parker has had a profound effect on American music. His music reached such a high level of melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic sophistication that saxophonists and other instrumentalists continue to study it as both a technical challenge and an aesthetic inspiration. This revised edition of Charlie Parker: His Music and Life has been revised throughout to account for new Charlie Parker scholarship and previously unknown Parker recordings that have emerged since the book’s initial publication. The volume opens by considering current research on Parker’s biography, laying out some of the contradictory accounts of his life, and setting the chronology straight where possible. It then focuses on Parker’s music, tracing his artistic evolution and major achievements as a jazz improviser. The musical discussions and transcribed musical examples include timecodes for easy location in recordings—a unique feature to this book.

Chasin' The Bird

Chasin' The Bird PDF Author: Dave Chisholm
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1940878381
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
The life and legends of Charlie Parker, told through the perspectives of those who knew him: a brother, a fellow artist, a photographer, a lover, a student, and a record store owner.

Chasin' the Bird

Chasin' the Bird PDF Author: Brian Priestley
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195327098
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Priestley offers new insight into Parker's career, beginning as a teenager single-mindedly devoted to mastering the saxophone through his death at 34 in such wretched condition that the doctor listed his age as 53.

Yardbird Suite

Yardbird Suite PDF Author: Lawrence O. Koch
Publisher: Popular Press
ISBN: 9780879722593
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
A comprehensive study of jazz great Charlie Parker, including details of record dates, more than 200 musical illustrations, and biographical material arranged chronologically and linked with Parker's recordings. The "Bird Stories" are all here, from Parker's Kansas City roots to his untimely death, as well as the seminal journal article on Parker's music, "Ornithology" that appeared in the Journal of Jazz Studies.

Charlie Parker Played be Bop

Charlie Parker Played be Bop PDF Author: Christopher Raschka
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
ISBN: 9780531070956
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 36

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Book Description
Introduces the famous saxophonist and his style of jazz known as bebop.

Kansas City Lightning

Kansas City Lightning PDF Author: Stanley Crouch
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062314068
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
“A tour de force. . . . Crouch has given us a bone-deep understanding of Parker’s music and the world that produced it. In his pages, Bird still lives.” — Washington Post A stunning portrait of Charlie Parker, one of the most talented and influential musicians of the twentieth century, from Stanley Crouch, one of the foremost authorities on jazz and culture in America. Throughout his life, Charlie Parker personified the tortured American artist: a revolutionary performer who used his alto saxophone to create a new music known as bebop even as he wrestled with a drug addiction that would lead to his death at the age of thirty-four. Drawing on interviews with peers, collaborators, and family members, Stanley Crouch recreates Parker’s Depression-era childhood; his early days navigating the Kansas City nightlife, inspired by lions like Lester Young and Count Basie; and on to New York, where he began to transcend the music he had mastered. Crouch reveals an ambitious young man torn between music and drugs, between his domineering mother and his impressionable young wife, whose teenage romance with Charlie lies at the bittersweet heart of this story. With the wisdom of a jazz scholar, the cultural insights of an acclaimed social critic, and the narrative skill of a literary novelist, Stanley Crouch illuminates this American master as never before.

Every Dead Thing

Every Dead Thing PDF Author: John Connolly
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501122622
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 512

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Book Description
PI Charlie Parker, a former New York policeman, searches for the killer of his wife and daughter. Two women help him, a pretty criminal psychologist and an old Creole woman with psychic vision.

Celebrating Bird

Celebrating Bird PDF Author: Gary Giddins
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452940797
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Within days of Charlie “Bird” Parker’s death at the age of thirty-four, a scrawled legend began appearing on walls around New York City: Bird Lives. Gone was one of the most outstanding jazz musicians of any era, the troubled genius who brought modernism to jazz and became a defining cultural force for musicians, writers, and artists of every stripe. Arguably the most significant musician in the country at the time of his death, Parker set the standard many musicians strove to reach—though he never enjoyed the same popular success that greeted many of his imitators. Today, the power of Parker’s inventions resonates undiminished; and his influence continues to expand. Celebrating Bird is the groundbreaking and award-winning account of the life and legend of Charlie Parker from renowned biographer and critic Gary Giddins, whom Esquire called “the best jazz writer in America today.” Richly illustrated and drawing primarily from original sources, Giddins overturns many of the myths that have grown up around Parker. He cuts a fascinating portrait of the period, from Parker’s apprentice days in the 1930s in his hometown of Kansas City to the often difficult years playing clubs in New York and Los Angeles, and reveals how Parker came to embody not only musical innovation and brilliance but the rage and exhilaration of an entire generation. Fully revised and with a new introduction by the author, Celebrating Bird is a classic of jazz writing that the Village Voice heralded as “a celebration of the highest order”—a portrayal of a jazz virtuoso whose gargantuan talent was haunted by his excesses and a view into the ravishing art of one of jazz’s most commanding and remarkable figures.

The Charlie Parker Real Book

The Charlie Parker Real Book PDF Author: Charlie Parker
Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
ISBN: 1540038645
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 72

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Book Description
(Fake Book). Features 57 signature songs that this bebop genius either composed or co-wrote, all in Real Book style! Includes: Anthropology * Billie's Bounce (Bill's Bounce) * The Bird * Bird of Paradise * Blues for Alice * Confirmation * Donna Lee * Kim * Ko Ko * Moose the Mooche * Now's the Time * Ornithology * Parker's Mood * Scrapple from the Apple * Shawnuff * Yardbird Suite * and more. All Hal Leonard Real Books feature time-tested songs in accurate arrangements in the famous easy-to-read, hand-written notation.