Charles Parker Jr. (August 29, 1920 – March 12, 1955), nicknamed “Bird” or “Yardbird”, was an American jazz saxophonist, bandleader, and composer. Parker was a highly influential soloist and leading figure in the development of bebop, a form of jazz characterized by fast tempos, virtuosic technique, and advanced harmonies. He was a virtuoso and introduced revolutionary rhythmic and harmonic ideas into jazz, including rapid passing chords, new variants of altered chords, and chord substitutions. Parker primarily played the alto saxophone. Parker was an icon for the hipster subculture and later the Beat Generation, personifying the jazz musician as an uncompromising artist and intellectual rather than just an entertainer.

Charles Parker Jr. was born in 1920, in Kansas City to Charles Parker Sr. and Adelaide “Addie” Bailey, who was of mixed Choctaw and African-American background. His father, a Pullman waiter and chef on the railways, was often required to travel for work, but provided some musical influence because he was a pianist, dancer, and singer on the Theatre Owners Booking Association circuit. Parker first went to a Catholic school and sang in its choir, but his parents separated in 1930 due to his father’s alcoholism and the effects of the Great Depression. Parker began playing the saxophone at age 11, and at age 14, he joined the Lincoln High School band, where he studied under bandmaster Alonzo Lewis. His mother purchased him a new alto saxophone around the same time. Parker’s biggest influence in his early teens was a young trombone player named Robert Simpson, who taught him the basics of improvisation. Parker withdrew from high school in December 1935, joined the local musicians’ union, and decided to pursue his musical career full-time. Parker began to play with local bands in jazz clubs around Kansas City and often ambitiously took part in jam sessions with more experienced musicians. In early-1936, at one such jam session with the Count Basie Orchestra, he lost track of the chord changes while improvising. This prompted Jo Jones to contemptuously remove a cymbal from his drum kit and throw it at his feet as a signal to leave the stage. Parker vowed to practice harder. He mastered improvisation and, according to his comments in an interview with Paul Desmond, spent the next three to four years practicing up to 15 hours a day.Parker proposed to Rebecca Ruffin, his girlfriend four years his senior, and the two married on July 25, 1936. They had two children before divorcing in 1939, in large part due to his growing drug addiction. In 1939, Parker moved to New York City to pursue his musical career but worked part-time jobs to make a living. Among the more musically significant of these was as a dishwasher, for nine dollars a week, at Jimmie’s Chicken Shack, where pianist Art Tatum performed. Struggling with poverty, Parker went to the home of fellow alto saxophone player Buster Smith to ask for help. Smith allowed Parker to live in his apartment for six months and gave him gigs in his band. Parker’s playing at the gigs impressed several New York musicians, including pianist and bandleader Earl Hines.

While living in New York, Parker achieved his musical breakthrough, developing a new improvisational vocabulary which later came to be known as “bebop”.Due to the strike of 1942–1944 by the American Federation of Musicians, during which time few professional recordings were made much of bebop’s critical early development was not captured for posterity due to the ban, and the new genre gained limited radio exposure as a result. Parker’s time with Hines’s band and his travel between New York and Chicago enabled him to model his style on, according to his own words, a “combination of the Midwestern beat and the fast New York tempos”. Parker began writing compositions thanks to his growing friendship with Gillespie, who began notating Parker’s solos as melodies. Among these early Parker compositions were “Ko-Ko”, “Anthropology”, and “Confirmation”. Parker left Hines’s band and formed a small group with Gillespie, pianist Al Haig, bassist Curley Russell, and drummer Stan Levey. The group stood out from its contemporaries, as it was racially integrated and lacked a guitarist for rhythmic support. This new format freed soloists from harmonic and rhythmic restrictions, and in late 1944, the group secured a gig at the Three Deuces club in New York. The group’s name recognition spread along 52nd Street, and its style was dubbed “bebop” for the first time. Musicians at other clubs came to hear bebop and reacted unfavourably to it because, according to Charles Mingus, they saw it as a threat to their style of jazz. In December 1945, the Parker band travelled to an unsuccessful engagement at the Billy Berg’s club in Los Angeles. Most of the group returned to New York, but Parker remained in California, cashing in his return ticket to buy heroin.

Parker’s style of composition involved writing original melodies over existing jazz forms and standards, a practice known as writing a contrafact, which is still common in jazz today. Examples include “Ornithology” (which borrows the chord progression of jazz standard “How High the Moon” and “Moose The Mooche” (one of many Parker compositions based on the chord progression of “I Got Rhythm”). The practice was not uncommon prior to bebop, but it became a signature of the movement as artists began to move away from arranging popular standards and toward composing their own material. Perhaps Parker’s most well-known contrafact is “Ko-Ko”, which is based on the chord changes of the popular bebop tune “Cherokee”, written by Ray Noble. Parker contributed greatly to the modern jazz solo, one in which triplets and pick-up notes were used in unorthodox ways to lead into chord tones, affording the soloist more freedom to use passing tones, which soloists previously avoided. It’s the difference between walking a straight line and dancing around it—you still end up at the same destination, but the journey is much more sophisticated.