Kansas City Lightning

The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker

Stanley Crouch

$39.99

Hardback

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English

Harper Torch
25 August 2014

Music; Jazz; Biography: arts & entertainment

Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker is the first installment in the long-awaited portrait of 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, Kansas City Lightning 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: Stanley Crouch
Imprint: Harper Torch
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 236mm, Width: 164mm, Spine: 33mm
Weight: 696g
ISBN: 9780062005595
ISBN 10: 0062005596
Pages: 365
Publication Date: 25 August 2014
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
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

Commended for Black Caucus of the American Library Association Literary_award (Nonfiction) 2014
Short-listed for Hurston/Wright LEGACY Award (Nonfiction) 2014
Winner of PROSE (Biography/Autobiography) 2013
Winner of PROSE (Excel in Humanities) 2013