Bird

[rich]

new bio of charlie parker. some great anecdotes.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/nov/07/bird/

He haunted the clubs on 12th Street and Vine in Kansas City with
“mysterious bags under his eyes and an appearance just short of an unmade
bed,” only to light up the bandstand. And then, at his first taste of
revenge over the Kansas City musicians who had laughed him off the
bandstand, he hopped onto a freight train in early 1939, leaving behind his
wife and their one-year-old son. He took nothing with him—not even his
horn, which he pawned. He lived among hobos and found he liked it, in large
part because race didn’t matter to
them.3<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/nov/07/bird/#fn-3>

3 According to Parker’s widow Chan Richardson, he was happiest hanging out
in Lower East Side Ukrainian bars with working-class men who had no idea
who he was. Bird, she wrote in her memoir, would have preferred to have
been born “white and untalented.”
↩<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/nov/07/bird/#fnr-3>
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