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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.
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Play NowCharlie Parker. (2013). The Biography Channel website. Retrieved 08:40, May 22, 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 22 May 2013].
"Charlie Parker." 2013. The Biography Channel website. May 22 2013, 08:40 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 22, 2013].
"Charlie Parker," The Biography Channel website, http://www.biography.com/people/charlie-parker-9433413 (accessed May 22, 2013).
Charlie Parker [Internet]. The Biography Channel website; 2013 [cited 2013 May 22] Available from: http://www.biography.com/people/charlie-parker-9433413.
Charlie Parker, http://www.biography.com/people/charlie-parker-9433413 (last visited May 22, 2013).
Charlie Parker. The Biography Channel website. 2013. Available at: http://www.biography.com/people/charlie-parker-9433413. Accessed May 22, 2013.
To make matters worse, in 1951 Parker was arrested for heroin possession and had his cabaret card revoked, which meant he couldn’t perform in New York clubs. By the time he got the card back a year later, his reputation was so damaged that club owners still refused to let him play. Drug-addled and depressed, Parker tried to take his own life twice in 1954, by drinking iodine. Although he survived both attempts, his physical and mental health had greatly deteriorated.
In 1955,
Contents
Parker was visiting with his friend Baroness "Nica" Pannonica de Koenigswarter when he suffered an ulcer attack and refused to go to the hospital. On March 12, 1955, Charlie Parker died in the baroness’s New York City apartment of lobar pneumonia and the devastating effects of long-term substance abuse.
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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.
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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.
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