I’VE GOT RHYTHM – The two lives of Charlie Parker, between Kansas City and New York

He was a legendary Grammy Award–winning jazz saxophonist who invented the musical style called bop or bebop. Charlie Parker was born on August day of 1920, in Kansas City. An only child, he moved with his parents to Kansas City, when he was 7 years old. By the time Charlie was 15, the alto saxophone was his instrument of choice. From 1935 to 1939, he played the Kansas City, Missouri nightclub scene with local jazz and blues bands. In 1939 Parker moved to New York City, to pursue a career in music. He held several other jobs as well. Parker’s style of composition involved interpolation of original melodies over existing jazz forms and standards. Throughout his adult life, his battles with heroin addiction, alcoholism and mental illness caused turbulence in his career. http://americanjazzmuseum.org/

Charlie Parcher contributed greatly to the modern jazz solo, one in which triplets and pick-up notes were used in unorthodox ways to lead into chord tones, affording the soloist with more freedom to use passing tones, which soloists previously avoided. Charlie Parker died on March day of 1955, in the suite of his friend Pannonica de Koenigswarter at the Stanhope Hotel, in New York City. For the Kansas Kity’s Charlie Parker Celebration http://kcjazzalive.org/2016-charlie-parker-celebration/ until August 27, 2016.

Charlie Parker – Summertime

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1bWqViY5F4

Charlie Parker – All the things you are

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTORd2Y_X6U

Ornithology by Charlie Parker

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsAMAIaas94

Charlie Parker – Bebop

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0KeCRirEoU