LIGHTNING A KANSAS CITY / THE RISE OF CHARLIE PARKER – A book by Stanley Crouch
Lightning in Kansas City is the first chapter in the biography that Stanley Crouch dedicated to Charlie Parker, the greatest saxophonist of all time. This book reconstructs the life of ‘Bird’ in the years from birth in 1920 until 1940 (his childhood in Kansas City dominated from the underworld; the relationship with an overprotective mother; the marriage at sixteen and early parenthood; the fascination for music, film, technology, adventure, the encounter with the drug; the transfer to New York, where the second phase of Parker’s life would be opened. in the middle between the essay and the short story, among ‘fresco of an era and the novel of formation, Lightning in Kansas City is a vivid and unusual “portrait of the artist as a young man.”
