Bird Lives!

NPR profiles the father of bebop Charlie Parker:

It’s safe to say that without Charlie Parker, the music we now call bebop might never have existed. While other musicians in New York — Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and Bud Powell among them — were creating the musical building blocks that would later become part of bebop, it was Parker’s innovative phrasing on alto saxophone that provided the glue that brought it all together as a new jazz revolution.

Check out part 1 of the prgram.