Charlie Parker, legendary jazz saxophonist and composer, was born on 29th August 1920

Yesterday we mentioned Dinah Washington, a performer who despite dying when she was just 38, left a marvellous legacy of jazz recordings. Today we have another, even more significant wearer of that mantle, in Charlie Parker, who was just 34 when he died, but by that time had changed the face of jazz, and during his lifetime had influenced a generation of musicians. He was born in Kansas and came to music during his teens, his lack of formal ability spurring him to practise endlessly to master complex tonal structures on the alto sax, laying the foundation of bebop in his mind and psyche. Influenced by the local bands of Basie and Benny Moten, he joined Jay McShann's territory band in the late '30s, then moved to New York, where he played with Earl Hines, where he met Dizzy Gillespie. During the recording ban of 1943-5, Parker and other iconoclasts in the jazz world played in unofficial clubs developing the music that "they" couldn't play, "they" being the white bandleaders of the day, and after WW2 ended, this movement, called bebop, took hold (there is not space here to explain the musical definition of bebop - people have written whole books about it). For the next decade Parker veered from genius to hopeless oblivion because of his heroin addiction, but was still able to produce a remarkable canon of marvellous jazz performances and recordings, which were transcribed and copied by his peers. He played with and influenced some of the great names of the time - Davis, Gillespie, Mingus, Monk, Roach and dozens more, and it is hard to believe that he was only 34 when he died in 1955. Acrobat has on catalogue a collection of some of those landmark recordings - for full details click here.