Saxophone virtuoso Charlie "Bird" Parker began playing professionally in his early teens, became a heroin addict at 16, changed the course of music, and then died when only 34 years old. His friend Robert Reisner observed, "Parker, in the brief span of his life, crowded more living into it than any other human being." Like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane, he was a transitional composer and improviser who ushered in...

" Within days of Charlie "Bird" Parker's death at the age of thirty-four, a scrawled legend began appearing on walls around New York City: Bird Lives. Gone was one of the most outstanding jazz musicians of any era, the troubled genius who brought modernism to jazz and became a defining cultural force for musicians, writers, and artists of every stripe. Arguably the most significant musician in the country at the time of his death, Parker set the standard...

The life of legendary jazz musician Charlie "Yardbird" Parker, directed and produced by jazz fan, Clint Eastwood. The film uses actual recordings by Parker with the backgrounds removed, and accompaniment by modern musicians attuned to the Yardbird's improvisations.

Profiles the life and career of jazz saxophonist Charlie "Bird" Parker.

In this thinly disguised account of the last years of Charlie "Bird" Parker, comedian Dick Gregory stars as Richie "Eagle" Coles, a jazz saxophonist with a genius for friendship and self-destruction.