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.
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Winner of the Prose Award for Humanities
Finalist for the NAACP Image Award
Finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award
A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year
No musician has lived a more transformational, or tragic, life than Charlie Parker, one of the most talented and influential figures of the twentieth century. Drawing on decades of original interviews with peers, collaborators, and family members, Stanley Crouch reveals Parker as he was: from the dance clubs of late-night Kansas City, where he learned his craft, to the ballrooms of wartime Harlem, it offers an unprecedented window into the world—and intimate life—of the young genius.
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Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. No musician has lived a more transformational, or more tragic, life than Charlie Parker, one of the most talented and influential figures of the twentieth century. Yet no writer has fully captured the arc and texture of Parkers personal story.until now. In Kansas City Lightning, award-winning critic Stanley Crouch draws on decades of original interviews with peers, collaborators, and family members to reveal Parker as he emerged from the landscapesliteral and artisticthat he inhabited. It follows Parker from his youth amidst the bands and characters of late-night Kansas City during the Depression, to the segregated union halls of Chicago, and finally to New Yorks Harlem ballrooms. Most intimately, it brings us into young Charlie Parkers family circle, as he plunged headlong into a very adult worldlured by both music and drugs, torn between his protective mother and his young wife Rebecca Ruffin, the impressionable young woman whose romance with Charlie is at the bittersweet heart of this story. 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." Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9780062005618
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