Charlie Parker Every aspiring jazz musician, unless he/she is one of those committed to traditional jazz, will go through a Charlie Parker period and essentially never come out. He was and remains a phenomenon just as much as Mozart or Beethoven or Chopin. But unlike them he continues to be a phenomenon not so much for what he wrote down but because you can still hear him. And that's the magic. He was technically brilliant, unlike anyone who came before. His imagination and inventiveness and complexity were just amazing. For anybody who might be interested there is a great book about his life called Bird Lives!
