Kansas City Lightning Kansas City Lightning

Kansas City Lightning

The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker

    • $11.99
    • $11.99

Publisher Description

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 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 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.

“A virtuous performance.” —David Hajdu, New York Times Book Review

“A magnificent achievement; I could hardly put it down.” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

“Insightful, profound, and wholly original.” —Wynton Marsalis

“A jazz biography that ranks with the very best.” —Booklist, starred review

“In prose that veers toward lyrical rapture, [Crouch] conjures the inner life of the improvising artist.” —The New Yorker

GENRE
Biographies & Memoirs
RELEASED
2013
September 24
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
405
Pages
PUBLISHER
HarperCollins
SELLER
OpenRoad Integrated Media, LLC
SIZE
5.3
MB

More Books by Stanley Crouch

The All-American Skin Game, or Decoy of Race The All-American Skin Game, or Decoy of Race
1995
Considering Genius Considering Genius
2009
The Artificial White Man The Artificial White Man
2009
Always in Pursuit Always in Pursuit
1998
Victory Is Assured: Uncollected Writings of Stanley Crouch Victory Is Assured: Uncollected Writings of Stanley Crouch
2022
Don't the Moon Look Lonesome Don't the Moon Look Lonesome
2000