Overview

""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

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9780306806797

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Ross Russell is the author of The Sound, a novel of the jazz world, and Jazz Style in Kansas City and the Southwest. In 1946 he formed Dial Records, heading the company for a decade, during which he released records by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Miles Davis.

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