From 1944 on, partnered by Gillespie and, later, by a teenage Miles Davis, Parker created some of the most dynamic jazz in the music's history, with tunes such as Now's the Time, Ornithology, Billie's Bounce, Yardbird Suite and Ko-Ko often scribbled on scraps of paper on the way to sessions, or during warm-ups. ![]() But bop was eventually recognised as a natural progression from the jazz that had gone before. Many established stars, including Louis Armstrong, hated it. To unprepared musicians and audiences, bop could sound at first as if soloists had arrived in the wrong places, forgotten to resolve phrases, used chords too stacked with extra notes to play on, and perversely accented traditionally weak beats instead of strong ones. In the small hours at Minton's, bebop, or just bop, was forged. In 1939 (a couple of years after the Reno Club nightmare and already married, divorced, the father of a son, and struggling with a drugs and booze habit that had begun in his teens), Parker joined Jay McShann's band and stayed with them until 1942.Īt Minton's Playhouse, a Harlem jamming joint, Parker met such like-minded young swing dissidents as drummer Kenny Clarke, former church pianist Thelonious Monk, Benny Goodman's star guitarist Charlie Christian and the harmonically advanced trumpeter John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie. He learned to play in every key because he didn't know jazz musicians only used a few – and with a little help from some older Kansas musicians, figured out how to shift between keys within solos. He mostly skipped formal education, but schooled himself on the saxophone with Young as his model. ![]() She gave her son his first sax when he was 13, and the following year Charlie was hanging out in the city's clubland listening to his saxophone hero Lester Young and others while Addie was at work as a night cleaner. He was born in Kansas City in 1920 and raised by a devoted single mother, Addie. When he died – broke and broken down by self-neglect and dangerous addictions – at the age of only 34, graffiti artists scrawled "Bird Lives!" on Harlem walls. Ross Russell, Charlie Parker's biographer, has the teenager leaving the club saying to himself, "I'll be back" and he kept his promise – not only returning to square things with doubters, but to show everybody with an open mind and open ears a new kind of 20th-century music-making.Ĭharlie Parker (nicknamed "Yardbird" or usually just "Bird" in the jazz world) was the JS Bach of jazz an instinctive master of complex harmony with a dizzying melodic ingenuity to match, who became a messiah to the hipster and beat poetry generation of the late 1940s and early 50s. ![]() Jones contemptuously threw a cymbal at his feet, and the reverberations were followed by the sound of laughter and catcalls. ![]() Jones stopped, and Parker froze, clutching his gleaming new saxophone. While Jones's pulse surged on behind him, the teenager lost the tune, and then the beat. A college-trained musician could have called out the next chord to him in an instant, but Parker was a high school dropout making it up for himself.
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