Life of Charlie Parker

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CHARLIE "BIRD" PARKER POSTER ART




Life of Charlie Parker is an inspiring story of a true original! They called him "YARDBIRD" 'cause he was always so high he could fly! Just kidding! Charlie "Bird" Parker was the originator of Bebop.

The father of soaring freedom on the sax, originality in jazz and a dude who took his life and music to extremes.

Parker was the main focus in the development of bebop, a form of jazz characterized by fast tempos, virtuoso technique, and improvisation based on harmonic structure.

Charlie Parker's revolutionary approaches to melody, rhythm, and harmony exercised enormous influence on his contemporaries. The dude was just on a totally different level than all the other cats playing jazz back then!

Several of Parker's songs have become standards, including "Billie's Bounce," "Anthropology," "Ornithology," and "Confirmation". He introduced revolutionary harmonic ideas including a tonal vocabulary employing 9ths, 11ths and 13ths of chords, rapidly implied passing chords, and new variants of altered chords and chord substitutions.

His tone was clean and penetrating, but sweet and plaintive on ballads. Although many Parker recordings demonstrate dazzling virtuoso technique and complex melodic lines — such as "Koko," "Kim," and "Leap Frog" — he was also one of the great blues players. The boy was FEARLESS and would dive head first into the music!

His themeless blues improvisation "Parker's Mood" represents one of the most deeply affecting recordings in jazz. At various times, Parker fused jazz with other musical styles, from classical to Latin music, blazing paths followed later by others.

Bird, was so cool that he influenced the "Beats" and he also became an icon for the hipster subculture and later the Beat generation, personifying the idea of the jazz musician as an uncompromising artist and intellectual, rather than just a popular entertainer.

We owe alot to YardBird for making Jazz as a higher form of ART. He partied like there was no tommorrow and chased the skirts like a true "Jazz-Cat"!



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