Adam Shatz: Bird! - Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker by Stanley Crouch Harper, 365 pp., $27.99

Working at a comfortable remove from his hometown, Parker began to find his voice on the alto, and to learn how to listen and respond “in digital time” to other musicians: the art that, as Crouch emphasizes, lies at the heart of his genius as an improviser. But he also discovered the pleasures that would kill him. According to Crouch, Parker was first prescribed morphine around 1937, after a car accident in which he broke his ribs. A few months after Rebecca became pregnant with their son Leon, he invited her to watch as he inserted a needle in his arm, then left for the night. That scene, chillingly described by Crouch, left Rebecca in little doubt about where his loyalties stood. Soon afterward she found a letter from another woman under his pillow; he asked her to return it at gunpoint. He gave her crabs and stole from her. When she miscarried their second child, he flushed it down the toilet. The family doctor told her that if he continued to use heroin, he would live no more than eighteen to twenty years: an accurate prediction.

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