CELEBRATING BIRD THE TRIUMPH OF CHARLIE PARKER by GARY GIDDENS 1987 1ED HC BOOK

Description: CELEBRATING BIRD THE TRIUMPH OF CHARLIE PARKER by GARY GIDDENS 1987 STATED FIRST EDITION HARDCOVER DJ BOOK Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker by Gary Giddins Book Details Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker. Publisher: Beech Tree Books/William Morrow, New York. Author: Gary Giddens. Stated First Edition, 1987. Original hardback edition with dj. 128 pp. Size: 12" x 9". Condition: Near fine book with tight binding, clean interior; very good dustjacket with small tear / chip at the bottom. Many full-page photo reproductions of Charlie Parker as well as his music contemporaries. Inner pages printed on coated stock. Published in 1987, this is jazz writer Gary Giddins’s no-nonsense biography of the transformative jazz alto saxophonist Charlie (“Bird”) Parker. One of the co-founders of bebop in the ’40s, Charlie Parker had an influence on modern jazz, and indeed on every jazz musician who came after him, that cannot be overstated. And yet, remarkably, when Life Magazine published a feature article on what was then the new music of bebop, Charlie Parker’s name never came up. And, later, when Time published a cover article on modern jazz, it was the image of Dave Brubeck that graced the cover. The Giddins biography, however belatedly, gets it right, documenting unsentimentally Bird’s seismic impact on jazz, crediting the saxophonist with modernizing jazz, advancing it beyond the swing and dixieland jazz that preceded it. The life story of Charlie Parker, though, as much as it is a story of artistic genius, is equally about the man’s long addiction to heroin and, later, also to alcohol. There is no doubt that it was his addictions that ended his life in 1955 at only 34 years old. While Celebrating Bird avoids romanticizing Parker’s story, it is in no way an overly academic volume either. At Giddins’s skilled hands, we learn of Bird’s early influences and experiences, both good and bad. We learn of his commitment to achieving excellence in his playing, his long hours of practice, his breakthroughs as he unravels the secrets that allow him to play what he’d been hearing. We learn too the details of his struggles with heroin and alcohol, the effects of both on his brain, about his hospitalization for addiction, and finally of his death. About Author Gary Giddens GARY GIDDINS is a jazz critic and a long-time columnist for the Village Voice and a preeminent jazz critic who received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award, and the Bell Atlantic Award for Visions of Jazz: The First Century in 1998. His other books include Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams—The Early Years, 1903–1940, which won the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award and the ARSC Award for Excellence in Historical Sound Research; Weatherbird: Jazz at the Dawn of Its Second Century; Faces in the Crowd; Natural Selection; and biographies of Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker. He has won an unparalleled six ASCAP–Deems Taylor Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Peabody Award in Broadcasting. Giddins is also the producer of a documentary film that’s based on the biography and also named Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker.

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End Time: 2024-12-02T18:57:07.000Z

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