Charlie parker biography video

At age eleven, he had just begun to play the saxophone. At age twenty he was leading a revolution in modern jazz music. At thirty-four, he was dead from years of drug and alcohol use. A father of bebop, he influenced generations of musicians, and sparked the fire of one of the most important and successful American artistic movements. By age twelve he was playing in the high school marching band and in local dance hall combos.

It was then that he first heard the new sounds of jazz.

Charlie parker last photo

Hanging around the Kansas City clubs, the young Parker went to hear every new musician to pass through. As a teenager he married his childhood sweetheart, Rebecca Parker Davis. Living in Kansas City, they had a child, but as Kansas City declined as a center for jazz, Parker longed to leave his hometown for New York. So, just around age twenty, Parker sold his horn, left his family, and hopped on a train to New York, where he was destined to change the face of American music forever.

Within a short while he was the talk of the town and Dizzy Gillespie and other members of the Earl Hines band convinced Hines to hire him.