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Kansas City Lightning

The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker

Stanley Crouch

$29.99

Paperback

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English
Harper Collins
20 October 2014
“A tour de force. . . . Crouch has given us a bone-deep understanding of Parker’s music and the world that produced it. In his pages, Bird still lives.” — Washington Post

A stunning portrait of Charlie Parker, one of the most talented and influential musicians of the twentieth century, from Stanley Crouch, one of the foremost authorities on jazz and culture in America.

Throughout his life, Charlie Parker personified the tortured American artist: a revolutionary performer who used his alto saxophone to create a new music known as bebop even as he wrestled with a drug addiction that would lead to his death at the age of thirty-four.

Drawing on interviews with peers, collaborators, and family members, Stanley Crouch recreates Parker’s Depression-era childhood; his early days navigating the Kansas City nightlife, inspired by lions like Lester Young and Count Basie; and on to New York, where he began to transcend the music he had mastered. Crouch reveals an ambitious young man torn between music and drugs, between his domineering mother and his impressionable young wife, whose teenage romance with Charlie lies at the bittersweet heart of this story.

With the wisdom of a jazz scholar, the cultural insights of an acclaimed social critic, and the narrative skill of a literary novelist, Stanley Crouch illuminates this American master as never before.

By:  
Imprint:   Harper Collins
Country of Publication:   United States
Dimensions:   Height: 203mm,  Width: 135mm,  Spine: 23mm
Weight:   344g
ISBN:   9780062005618
ISBN 10:   0062005618
Pages:   400
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Reviews for Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker

[A] meticulous biography of Parker. . . . In Crouch's passages, he very nearly invents a new language for discussing jazz. --Popmatters.com


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