who owns the bird?

This morning, a local radio show discussed the life and music of Charlie Parker. The Bird was born in Kansas City in 1920, left here at 19 and went to New York. The discussion was pretty good. One fellow is impersonating Charlie at a “Meet the Past” event at the library where Crosby Kemper III will "interview Charlie", and another gentleman is the curator at the KC Jazz Museum.

Charlie died young at 34, in 1955. I love his style and think his music must have been so exciting at the time because it was so unique and sophisticated. The people talking about Bird seemed to imply that Kansas City owns him, his legacy. Charlie s buried here in Lincoln Cemetery, much against the wished of Charlie Parker. Charlie considered New York his home and even mentioned a few times that he’d never want to be buried in KC.

With artists, I think that despite some people’s historical focus upon the artist, trying to trace places and influences, putting plaques on birthplaces and finding gravesites, the real spirit of the artist endures in the art…the recording, the sculpture, the painting, the composition, the choreography, the poem, the photograph, the score, and for Charlie, the “be bop”.