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According to Frederick J. Spencer, MD*, Charlie Parker died from lobar pneumonia on the 12th of March 1955 whilst watching the Dorsey Brothers TV show. Pneumonia may have killed him, but in reality, it was a life of excesses that wore his body out and destroyed him.
Born in 1920 in Wyandotte County, Kansas, the saxophonist Charlie ‘Yardbird’ or ‘Bird’ Parker emerged onto the jazz scene at the end of the Second World while Big Band or ‘Swing’ was at the peak of its popularity. He was at the vanguard of a new style of jazz curtly titled ‘Bebop’, which became the foundation of modern jazz. Charlie Parker revolutionised the musical establishment, combining complex melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic forms, whilst displaying a completely mastery of the saxophone. Although Parker’s innovations have become part of the jazz lexicon and popular music, by the end of the 1940s he remained relatively unknown outside jazz circles. Most of the public never celebrated the young saxophone artist from Kansas City during his life and only learned of his role as a giant among modern jazz pioneers after his death in 1955.
D.H.Lawrence, when trying to describe the creative process said, "Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!" These lines from his poem Song of a Man Who Has Come Through perfectly expresses the paradox of Parker's genius. The immense creativity juxtaposed with an unfathomable self-destructiveness.
Someone once said there are only two forms of Jazz: before Charlie Parker and after Charlie Parker.
*Jazz and Death: Medical Profiles of Jazz Greats. Frederick J. Spencer, MD. University of Mississippi Press. 2002
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