Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker

Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker is the eagerly anticipated first part of a comprehensive look at one of the twentieth century's most talented and influential musicians, penned by Stanley Crouch, a leading authority on jazz and American culture.

Throughout his life, Charlie Parker embodied the quintessential tortured American artist: a groundbreaking performer who used his alto saxophone to forge a new musical genre known as bebop, all while grappling with a drug addiction that tragically led to his death at just thirty-four years old.

Drawing on interviews with his contemporaries, collaborators, and family, Kansas City Lightning vividly reconstructs Parker's childhood during the Depression era; his early experiences navigating the vibrant Kansas City nightlife, inspired by greats like Lester Young and Count Basie; and his eventual move to New York, where he began to push beyond the musical boundaries he had already mastered. Crouch reveals an ambitious young man torn between his music and drugs, and between his formidable mother and his impressionable young wife, whose teenage romance with Charlie forms the poignant core of this narrative.

With the profound knowledge of a jazz scholar, the incisive cultural insights of an acclaimed social critic, and the storytelling prowess of a literary novelist, Stanley Crouch illuminates this American master in an unprecedented way.