Charlie Parker, born Charles Christopher Parker in 1920, was a product of Kansas City jazz as developed in the 1920s and 1930s. Parker is associated with the development of the Bebop style, and he was highly influential on jazz players who followed him. His life was short and tragic, marked by drug addiction and attempted suicide. He was 35 when he died, but his life had been so hard on him that the death certificate gave his age as 55 because that was how he appeared (Rich 47).
Bebop represents modern jazz, which emerged as a distinctive style from movements taking place from the 1920s. Ted Gioia associates bebop with the larger force of modernism, and he notes that jazz had from the first been a modernist music whose leaders always looked forward and developed new musical forms. The rise of a new and more open modernism in the 1940s seemed an abrupt shift but was in reality a continuation of a trend, jazz's tendency to mutate and shift over time. Early modern jazz was a rebellion against the populist trappings of swing music:
The simple riffs, the accessible vocals, the orientation toward providing background music to social dancing, the thick big band textures built on interlocking brass and reed sections--these trademarks of prewar jazz were set aside in favor of a more streamlined, more insistent style (Gioia 201).
The thirty-two-bar song form and the twelve-bar blues remained the accepted forms, and the instrumentation of jazz remained the same as well. How the music was played, however, underwent a change. Improvised lines were now faster and more complex; syncopations were less prominent than in early jazz; and long phrases might now remain on the beat for measures at a time while building on a steady stream of eighth and sixteenth notes, occasionally broken by a triplet or some other interpolation. The 2/4 rhythms of Chicago and New Orleans was now replaced by the streamlined 4/4 favored by Kansas City ba...