Musical Space 1/10: Charlie Parker

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KMUW / Mark Foley

Jazz great Charlie Parker had a very important date once upon at time in Wichita as Mark Foley explains this week on Musical Space.

Charlie Parker, Kansas City native, and arguably the best saxophonist in human history, created and perfected bebop jazz. What’s bebop? Think of it like this: Use as many of the 12 pitches found in western music as you can as fast as you can. Parker discovered this at 19-years-old as he added notes to the major and minor scales. He transformed popular dance tunes and Broadway standards, livening them up for himself and other players.

High-energy, cerebral, sophisticated, and devilishly difficult to play, Parker made bebop seem effortless. His rhythm? Impeccable. His phrasing? Anything but mechanical.

It’s worth noting that Parker’s first professional recording session took place in Wichita just after Thanksgiving 1940. The 20-year-old had a gig at the Trocadero Club, on Douglas, with the Jay McShann Orchestra. The band snuck into the studios of the KFBI radio station at First and Market to make some acetate recordings that, miraculously, survived to document Wichita’s place in a musical revolution.

Music: “Lonely Boy Blues” Jay McShann Orchestra from Blues From Kansas City