Bird Lives!: The High Life and Hard Times of Charlie (Yardbird) Parker

"The best biography of any jazz musician that we have. Bird Lives will stand for a long time as a major source of information and illumination not only of the great musician with whom it deals but of the entire jazz life in this society."--Ralph Gleason

"Inspired by great affection and dedication, Bird Lives provides a vivid and accurate picture not only of the saxophonist-composer as artist and human being but of his zeitgeist and the musical/social setting that produced him. Parker was an immensely complex personality; saint and satyr, loving father and footloose vagabond, with a limitless appetite for sex, music, food, pills, heroin, liquor, life. A man of vast influence, the most admired and imitated creator of the mid-1940s bop revolution, he was forced to work in dives, reduced to bumming dollars when he should have been respected as a reigning virtuoso. . . . A sensitive, penetrating portrait."--Leonard Feather, Los Angeles Times

"One of the very few jazz books that deserve to be called literature . . . perhaps the finest writing on jazz to be found anywhere. . . . Those aware of Parker's genius cannot do without this book."--Grover Sales, Saturday Review


Binding Type: Paperback
Author: Russell, Ross
Published: 03/22/1996
Publisher: Da Capo Press
ISBN: 9780306806797
Pages: 432
Weight: 1.10lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.50w x 1.00d