Kansas City lightning
Subtitle: the rise and times of Charlie Parker
By: Stanley Crouch
Edition: First edition.
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2013
Language: eng
Number of pages: 365
ISBN-13: 9780062005595
Subjects: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY; Composers & Musicians; Biography; Jazz musicians
Description: The first installment in the long-awaited portrait of one of the most talented and influential musicians of the twentieth century. Charlie Parker personified the tortured American artist: a revolutionary performer who used his alto saxophone to create a new music known as bebop even as he wrestled with a drug addiction that would lead to his death at 34. With the wisdom of a jazz scholar, the cultural insights of a social critic, and the narrative skill of a novelist, drawing on interviews with peers, collaborators, and family members, Stanley Crouch recreates Parker's Depression-era childhood; his early days navigating the Kansas City nightlife, inspired by lions like Lester Young and Count Basie; and on to New York, where he began to transcend the music he had mastered. Crouch reveals an ambitious young man torn between music and drugs, between his domineering mother and his impressionable young wife, whose teenage romance with Charlie lies at the bittersweet heart of this story.--From publisher description.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 341-344) and index.
Table of contents: title: Born in bleeding Kansas; title: Infinite plasticity; title: An apprenticeship in blues and swing; title: Sorry, but I can't take you.