52 Facts About Charlie Parker

Charlie Parker was a virtuoso and introduced revolutionary rhythmic and harmonic ideas into jazz, including rapid passing chords, new variants of altered chords, and chord substitutions.

Charlie Parker was an icon for the hipster subculture and later the Beat Generation, personifying the jazz musician as an uncompromising artist and intellectual rather than just an entertainer.

Charlie Parker was raised in Kansas City, Missouri, near Westport Road.

Charlie Parker's father, a Pullman waiter and chef on the railways, was often required to travel for work, but provided some musical influence because he was a pianist, dancer, and singer on the Theatre Owners Booking Association circuit.

Charlie Parker's mother worked nights at the local Western Union office during the 1920s.

Charlie Parker first went to a Catholic school and sang in its choir, but his parents separated in 1930 due to his father's alcoholism and the effects of the Great Depression.

Charlie Parker began playing the saxophone at age 11, and at age 14 he joined the Lincoln High School band where he studied under bandmaster Alonzo Lewis.

Charlie Parker's mother purchased a new alto saxophone around the same time.

Charlie Parker's biggest influence in his early teens was a young trombone player named Robert Simpson, who taught him the basics of improvisation.

Charlie Parker withdrew from high school in December 1935, joined the local musicians' union, and decided to pursue his musical career full-time.

Charlie Parker mastered improvisation and, according to his comments in an interview with Paul Desmond, spent the next three to four years practicing up to 15 hours a day.

Charlie Parker proposed to Rebecca Ruffin, his girlfriend four years his senior, and the two were married on July 25,1936.

Along the way, the caravan of musicians had a car accident and Charlie Parker broke three ribs and fractured his spine.

In 1939, Charlie Parker moved to New York City to pursue his musical career but worked part-time jobs to make a living.

Charlie Parker's playing at these gigs impressed several New York musicians including pianist and bandleader Earl Hines.

The younger Charlie Parker then spent the summer in McShann's band playing at Fairyland Park for all-white audiences; trumpet player Bernard Anderson introduced him to Dizzy Gillespie.

The band toured nightclubs and other venues of the southwest, as well as Chicago and New York City, and Charlie Parker made his professional recording debut with McShann's band that year.

When in New York, to experiment with his new musical ideas that went beyond the bounds of McShann's group, Charlie Parker joined a group of young musicians who played in after-hours clubs in Harlem venues including Clark Monroe's Uptown House.

Charlie Parker left McShann's band in 1942 and played for one year with Hines, whose band included Gillespie.

The few recordings in which Charlie Parker participated in 1943 took place in Chicago and included a jam session recording with Gillespie and bassist Oscar Pettiford, another session with Billy Eckstine playing trumpet, some informally recorded practice sessions, and a duo with pianist Hazel Scott.

Charlie Parker left Hines' band and formed a small group with Gillespie, pianist Al Haig, bassist Curley Russell, and drummer Stan Levey.

On November 26,1945, Charlie Parker led a record date for Savoy Records, marketed as the "greatest Jazz session ever".

In December 1945, the Charlie Parker band traveled to an unsuccessful engagement at Billy Berg's club in Los Angeles.

However, after Charlie Parker dedicated one of his compositions to local drug dealer "Moose the Mooche" at a studio session in the spring, the dealer was arrested, and without access to heroin, Charlie Parker turned to alcohol addiction.

Charlie Parker suffered a physical and mental breakdown after a studio session in July 1946 for Dial Records, and was briefly jailed after setting the bed sheets of his Los Angeles hotel room on fire and then running naked through the lobby while intoxicated, after which he was committed to the Camarillo State Mental Hospital for six months.

When Charlie Parker received his discharge from the hospital, he was healthy and free from his drug habit.

Charlie Parker recorded dozens of sides for the Savoy and Dial labels, which remain some of the high points of his recorded output.

Ultimately the quintet used both pianists as Charlie Parker wanted to balance leadership of the group with mentoring younger musicians such as Davis.

Further, Granz was able to fulfil a longstanding desire of Charlie Parker's to perform with a string section.

Charlie Parker was a keen student of classical music, and contemporaries reported he was most interested in the music and formal innovations of Igor Stravinsky and longed to engage in a project akin to what later became known as Third Stream, a new kind of music, incorporating both jazz and classical elements as opposed to merely incorporating a string section into performance of jazz standards.

However, Charlie Parker became frustrated and disillusioned that, due to racial discrimination, he was reaching the limits of what he would be able to achieve in his career.

In 1953, Charlie Parker performed at Massey Hall in Toronto, joined by Gillespie, Mingus, Powell, and Roach.

Since 1950, Charlie Parker had been living in New York City with his common-law wife, Chan Berg, the mother of his son, Baird, and his daughter, Pree.

Charlie Parker considered Chan his wife, although he never married her; nor did he divorce his previous wife, Doris, whom he had married in 1948.

Charlie Parker was hospitalized and made a partial recovery by early 1955 before his health declined again in March.

Charlie Parker became drunk and a few days later visited the suite of Baroness Pannonica at the Stanhope Hotel in New York City in ill health.

Charlie Parker refused to go to hospital and died on March 12,1955 while watching The Dorsey Brothers' Stage Show on television.

The official causes of death were lobar pneumonia and a bleeding ulcer, but Charlie Parker had advanced cirrhosis and had suffered a heart attack and a seizure.

Charlie Parker's body was flown back to Missouri, in accordance with his mother's wishes.

Chan criticized Doris and Charlie Parker's family for giving him a Christian funeral even though they knew he was an atheist.

Charlie Parker was buried at Lincoln Cemetery in Missouri, in a hamlet known as Blue Summit, located close to I-435 and East Truman Road.

Charlie Parker's tomb was engraved with the image of a tenor saxophone, though Parker is primarily associated with the alto saxophone.

Later, some people wanted to move Charlie Parker's remains to reinforce redevelopment of the historic 18th and Vine area.

Charlie Parker acquired the nickname "Yardbird" early in his career while on the road with Jay McShann.

Charlie Parker's life was riddled with mental health problems and an addiction to heroin.

Nevertheless, Charlie Parker hated the recording and never forgave Ross Russell for releasing it.

Charlie Parker's life took a turn for the worse in March 1954 when his three-year-old daughter Pree died of cystic fibrosis and pneumonia.

Charlie Parker attempted suicide twice in 1954, which landed him in a mental hospital.

Charlie Parker 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 more freedom to use passing tones, which soloists previously avoided.

Charlie Parker's recordings were used for a book of solo transcriptions, the posthumously published Charlie Parker Omnibook.

Recordings of Charlie Parker were inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, which is a special Grammy award established in 1973 to honor recordings that are at least twenty-five years old, and that have "qualitative or historical significance".

From 1950 to 1954, Charlie Parker lived with Chan Berg on the ground floor of the townhouse at 151 Avenue B, across from Tompkins Square Park in Manhattan's East Village.