The best biography of any jazz musician that we have.
Those aware of Parker\'s genius cannot do without this book.--Grover Sales, Saturday Review. . . . perhaps the finest writing on jazz to be found anywhere. . .
A sensitive, penetrating portrait.--Leonard Feather, Los Angeles Times One of the very few jazz books that deserve to be called literature . . . .
A man of vast influence, the most admired and imitated creator of the mid-1940s bop revolution, he was forced to work in dives, reduced to bumming dollars when he should have been respected as a reigning virtuoso.
Parker was an immensely complex personality; saint and satyr, loving father and footloose vagabond, with a limitless appetite for sex, music, food, pills, heroin, liquor, life.
Bird Lives will stand for a long time as a major source of information and illumination not only of the great musician with whom it deals but of the entire jazz Life in this society.--Ralph Gleason Inspired by great affection and dedication, Bird Lives provides a vivid and accurate picture not only of the saxophonist-composer as artist and human being but of his zeitgeist and the musical/social setting that produced him.
The best biography of any jazz musician that we have
