Today is the 106th anniversary of Charlie Parker’s birth. It is hardly an overstatement to say that Parker changed the jazz landscape forever when his prodigious talent burst onto the scene in the 1940s. His legacy is that of the artist that changed the art itself.

Parker began playing the alto saxophone at age 11 and at 14 joined the band at his high school in Kansas City, Missouri. He practiced constantly (sometimes as much as 15 hours per day) and at 15 dropped out of high school, joined the musician's union local and began playing professionally around his hometown. Saxophonist Buster Smith was a tremendous influence on the young Parker and taught him to play double and triple-time figures. While travelling with a band to an out-of-town gig in 1936 Parker was seriously injured in an automobile accident. After the accident in which his spine was fractured he was treated with opioid pain killers and one can trace his life-long issues with drug abuse to the incident.

Charlie Parker, or “Yardbird” or just “Bird,” joined the Jay McShann band in 1938. McShann’s group travelled throughout the mid-west as well as to gigs in Chicago and New York City. Parker left McShann in 1939 and moved to New York where he had his musical epiphany. One night in a Harlem chili restaurant while soloing on Cherokee, Parker discovered a new way of improvising. He found, as he said, “that by using the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with appropriately related changes, I could play the thing I'd been hearing. I came alive."

There were other musicians that were feeling artistically suffocated by the commercial demands of the swing era and were champing at the bit to play something new. Many of them met for jam sessions at Minton’s Playhouse led by house pianist Thelonious Monk. Other regulars included Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Christian and Kenny Clarke. The style that was evolving would eventually be known as be-bop and was characterized by rapid tempos, complex harmonies, angular melodies and virtuosic improvisation. Much of their work, though, went on without public notice as there was a recording ban during much of the time the music was evolving.

But, at the end of World War II recordings of these musicians and the new musical style became available and created a firestorm of controversy within the jazz community. Some older musicians like Coleman Hawkins, Mary Lou Williams and Ella Fitzgerald embraced the new sounds, while others like Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway made derisive comments. Parker, and his friend Gillespie, were seen as the leaders of the movement and Bird developed a fanatical following of fans.

After continued bouts with drug addiction, Charlie Parker died on March 12, 1955, due to multiple health problems brought on by his abuse. Almost immediately graffiti began to appear around New York and elsewhere proclaiming “Bird Lives.” Bird’s music most definitely does live on in recordings and in the tremendous number of musicians influenced by his playing to this day.

Here is a link to Bird playing Yardbird Suite:

"YARDBIRD SUITE"