Kansas City Jazz - A Little Evil Will Do You Good - Con Chapman
Bird Takes Flight
Kansas City Jazz - A Little Evil Will Do You Good - Con Chapman
Con Chapman [+]
Music writer
Con Chapman is the author of Rabbit’s Blues: The Life and Music of Jonny Hodges (Oxford University Press, 2019), winner of the 2019 Book of the Year Award by Hot Club de France, and a 2020 Certificate of Merit for Best Historical Research from the Association for Recorded Sound Collections. His writing on jazz has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, Syncopated Times, and Brilliant Corners, among other publications.
Description
Charlie Parker takes the lessons he learned memorizing Lester Young solos and re- invents jazz, combining the blues of Kansas City and the Southwest with advanced harmonic principles he learns playing with innovators such as Tadd Dameron and William “Biddy” Fleet to write an outline for jazz’s next chapter. Parker’s development into a protean improviser and creator of a new jazz syntax is not a sure thing, as he overcomes personal problems and rough treatment by the elder statesmen of jazz to become one of the greatest innovators in the history of the music.