Happy Birthday to Charlie Parker!!

[WritingIsMyReligion]

August 29th, 1920--March 13th, 1955.

Father of modern-day jazz saxophone; founder of the bebop style of modern jazz; Beat generation icon, pressing the jazz musician as an artist and intellectual, rather than a mere popular entertainer.

Indisputably one of the idiom's very best, very influential figures.

He would be 86 were he still alive today.

All hail Bird!

:toast:

:party::party:

:bounce:

[Magrittes Pipe]

1. He would be 86 were he still alive today...

...and he'd look 200. ;)

[WritingIsMyReligion]

2. More like 2,000.

Poor Bird. :( :(

I mean, he was only 34 when he died, and he was practically insane there at the end.

:cry:

[jpgray]

3. His liver alone would have destroyed Tokyo by now

[WritingIsMyReligion]

4. Poor bastard.

:( :(

:cry:

[Arkham House]

5. Bird Lives!

Had he somehow been able to straighten himself out, and had he lived, he would have revolutionized American music again, somehow...the fact that I can't imagine how simply means that I am not a genius, and he was, because genius means doing things mere mortals can't imagine. Parker knew perfectly well that the whole cabaret-booze-heroin milieu wasn't congenial to him as an artist, and he made sporadic attempts to break out of it--his string experiments, which have, in my opinion, been unfairly put down and patronized...and he had ambitions to study with so-called "serious" composers. Where this would have led him in the end, no one can know...his demons got the best of him...but he was one of the dozen greatest artists of the 20th century, in any field...

[WritingIsMyReligion]

6. Yay! Hurray for Bird, our genius!

I wish with every fiber of my being that he had not become such a joyous and yet tragic figure of jazz. I wish he was alive today, or at the very least had lived to see substantially more than 34 birthdays.

:loveya:, Bird.

[bif]

7. "Diz Blows Bird At Newport!"

One of my favorite National Lampoon headlines of all time.

[WritingIsMyReligion]

8. HAH.

:rofl::rofl: