June Carter Cash
Famous Fiction Authors
Donna Summer
Angelina Jolie
My Ghost Story
I Survived
Babe Ruth
Johnny Cash
Georgia O'Keefe
I Survived
Quick Facts
- NAME: Charlie Parker
- OCCUPATION: Songwriter, Saxophonist
- BIRTH DATE: August 29, 1920
- DEATH DATE: March 12, 1955
- EDUCATION: Lincoln High School, Charles Sumner Elementary
- PLACE OF BIRTH: Kansas City, Kansas
- PLACE OF DEATH: New York, New York
- Full Name: Charles Christopher Parker Jr.
- Nickname: Bird
- Nickname: Yardbird
- AKA: Charles Parker
- AKA: Charlie Parker
Best Known For
Charlie Parker was a legendary Grammy Award–winning jazz saxophonist who with Dizzy Gillespie invented the musical style called bop or bebop.
Quiz
Think you know about Biography?
Answer questions and see how you rank against other players.
Play NowCharlie Parker. (2013). The Biography Channel website. Retrieved 10:51, May 19, 2013, from http://www.biography.com/people/charlie-parker-9433413.
Charlie Parker. [Internet]. 2013. The Biography Channel website. Available from: http://www.biography.com/people/charlie-parker-9433413 [Accessed 19 May 2013].
"Charlie Parker." 2013. The Biography Channel website. May 19 2013, 10:51 http://www.biography.com/people/charlie-parker-9433413.
"Charlie Parker," The Biography Channel website, 2013, http://www.biography.com/people/charlie-parker-9433413 [accessed May 19, 2013].
"Charlie Parker," The Biography Channel website, http://www.biography.com/people/charlie-parker-9433413 (accessed May 19, 2013).
Charlie Parker [Internet]. The Biography Channel website; 2013 [cited 2013 May 19] Available from: http://www.biography.com/people/charlie-parker-9433413.
Charlie Parker, http://www.biography.com/people/charlie-parker-9433413 (last visited May 19, 2013).
Charlie Parker. The Biography Channel website. 2013. Available at: http://www.biography.com/people/charlie-parker-9433413. Accessed May 19, 2013.
Synopsis
Charlie Parker was born on August 29, 1920 in Kansas City, Kansas. From 1935 to 1939, he played the Missouri nightclub scene with local jazz and blues bands. In 1945 he led his own group, while performing with Dizzy Gillespie on the side. Together they invented bebop. In 1949, Parker made his European debut. In 1955, he gave his last performance. He died a week later, on March 12, 1955, in New York City.
Contents
Quotes
"Don't play the saxophone. Let it play you."
"Music is your own experience. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn."
Early Life
Legendary jazz musician Charlie Parker was born Charles Christopher Parker Jr. on August 29, 1920, in Kansas City, Kansas. His father, Charles Parker, was an African-American stage entertainer, and his mother, Addie Parker, was a maid-charwoman of Native-American heritage. An only child, Charlie moved with his parents to Kansas City, Missouri, when he was 7 years old. At the time, the city was a lively center for African-American music, including jazz, blues and gospel.
Charlie discovered his own talent for music through taking lessons at public schools. As a teen, he played the baritone horn in the school band. By the time Charlie was 15, the alto saxophone was his instrument of choice. (Charlie’s mother had given him a saxophone a few years prior, to cheer him up after his father had abandoned the family.) While still in school, Charlie started playing with bands on the local club scene. He was so enamored of playing the sax that, in 1935, he decided to drop out of school in pursuit of a full-time musical career.
Musical Career
From 1935 to 1939, Parker played the Kansas City, Missouri, nightclub scene with local jazz and blues bands, including Buster Professor Smith’s band in 1937, and pianist Jay McShann’s band in 1938, with which he toured Chicago and New York.
In 1939 Parker decided to stick around New York City for a while. There he remained for almost a year, worked as a professional musician and jamming for pleasure on the side. After his yearlong stint in New York, Parker was featured as a regular performer at a Chicago club before deciding to move back to New York permanently. Freshly back in New York, Parker was at first forced to wash dishes in order to get by. At work, Charlie met guitarist Biddy Fleet. It would prove a fruitful encounter. While jamming with Biddy Fleet, Parker, who was bored by popular musical conventions, discovered a signature technique that involved playing the higher intervals of a chord for the melody and making changes to back them up accordingly.
Later that year Parker heard the news of his father’s death and went back to Kansas City, Missouri, for the funeral. After the funeral Parker joined Harlan Leonard’s Rockets and stayed in Missouri for the next five months. Parker then decided it was time to head back to New York, where he would rejoin Jay McShann’s band. It was with McShann’s band, in 1940, that Parker made his first recording. Parker stayed on with the band for four years, during which time he was given several opportunities to perform solo on their recordings. It was also during his time with Jay McShann’s band that Parker earned his famous nickname "Bird," short for "Yardbird." As the story goes, Parker was given the nickname for one of two possible reasons: 1) he was free as a bird or 2) he accidentally hit a chicken, otherwise known as a yard bird, while driving on tour with the band.
profile name: Charlie Parker profile occupation:
Your Connections
Sign in with Facebook to see how you and your friends are connected to famous icons.
Profile Connections
Included In These Groups
-
African-American Expats
View groupMany African-Americans left their country to escape the confines of racism, segregation and McCarthyism in the United States. As a result, an entirely new African-American subculture sprouted up in Europe, Africa and other countries abroad. A street in Paris is named after Josephine Baker, who found acceptance and fame in France that she couldn't achieve in the still-segregated United States. Marcus Garvey was a leader of the Back-to-Africa movement. And singer Nina Simone lived in several different countries, including Liberia, Switzerland, England and Barbados before eventually settling down in the South of France. Find out more about these African-American expats, and the new lives they made for themselves abroad, on Biography.com.
African-American Expats 9 people in this group
-
African-American Biopics
View groupWho can forget Angela Bassett as Tina Turner or Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles? Do you remember who played Billie Holiday? Or who Beyoncé performed as in the film Cadillac Records? More recent African-American biopics include the Lifetime original movie Betty & Coretta (2013), starring Angela Bassett as Coretta Scott King and Mary J. Blige as Betty Shabazz, and The Butler (2013), starring Forest Whitaker and based on the life of Eugene Allen.
View our photos of African-American biopics to compare these famous figures to the actors and actresses who have portrayed them.
African-American Biopics 39 people in this group
-
Famous Jazz Musicians
View groupWith its roots in the blues, jazz has been referred to as America's classical music, yet has also become a major global phenomenon, branching off into a variety of forms. Earlier pioneers like Scott Joplin and Jelly Roll Morton paved the way for the swinging big-band sounds of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. In contrast, contemporaries Dizzie Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk developed bebop, with its speedy, dissonant harmonies and improvisations. And Miles Davis heralded the birth of cool jazz, modal jazz and fusion at different points in his career. Famous jazz instrumentalists have tended to be male, yet women have been at the forefront of the genre when it comes to vocalization, from the brassy blues of Bessie Smith to the haunting eclecticism of Nina Simone.
Famous Jazz Musicians 29 people in this group
