PARKER, Charlie
(1920–1955)
PARKER, Charlie (29 August 1920–12 March 1955; b. Charles Christopher P.; aka Yardbird, Bird). Essentially self-taught on the alto saxophone, Parker became the premier jazzman of his generation, beginning his professional life at fifteen, coming to New York in 1939, and recording when he was twenty-one, in an initially precocious career. As one of the progenitors of the new style of the 1940s called Bebop, he excelled, in Nicolas Slonimsky's summary, at “virtuosic speed, intense tone, complex…