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Bird: The Life and Music of Charlie Parker. By Chuck Haddix. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013. Pp. 163, photographs, notes, index. Cloth, $24.95).
Alto saxophone virtuoso Charlie Parker changed the course of jazz music in the 1940s. Nicknamed "Bird" (for his lifelong propensity to eat chicken), Parker is considered one of the principal architects of the bebop movement, a genre notable for its fast tempos, complex harmonies, intricate melodies, and an overall high intellectual demand-both on performers and listeners. Given Parkers long-established primacy in the history of jazz music, there has been no shortage of biographies covering his musical accomplishments. However, in Bird: The Life and Music of Charlie Parker, Chuck Haddix argues that many details, especially of Parker's personal life, have remained unclear in the nearly six decades since his death in 1955. Haddix offers new insight through previously unpublished primary sources and lesser-known secondary sources, and he most notably brings further clarity to details from Parker's early life and career.
Although Parker was hardly the first or only jazz musician to suffer from drug addiction, his ravenous appetite for narcotics (heroin, in particular) and volatile...