![]() The museum believes it was the horn Parker played on his seminal album Charlie Parker with Strings, released in 1950 on Mercury Records. Reece says it also has distinct fingering, which made Parker’s prowess and virtuosity as an instrumentalist even more astounding. Parker was able to switch between different sounds in his playing and dealing with harmonies and melodies.” ![]() “He could effortlessly switch it to a dark and velvety tone. “It has a large bore bell (the flared part of the instrument) which offered a kind of unique, what some people describe as a throaty timbre,” Reece explains. Parker picked it up from Manny’s Music Store in Midtown Manhattan. White Company-later known as King’s Musical Instruments. Reece says it was made for him after Parker got an endorsement deal in December 1947 with Cleveland’s H.N. Some of the keys have mother of pearl inlays. The body is made of brass, and it has an engraved sterling silver bell with a floral design and Charlie Parker’s name. Looking at the instrument, one feels as if the metal would feel molten, if you could run your fingers along its shimmering body, or caress its keys. It is really a unique instrument both in its style and substance, and really is the one associated with the bebop Charlie Parker sound,” Reece says. “But the instrument we have is actually one that he acquired in late 1947, and was custom-made for him. The second is a plastic saxophone on display at the American Jazz Museum in his birthplace, Kansas City, Mo. “This is one of two instruments that have clear provenance and connection with Charlie Parker,” explains Dwandalyn Reece, the museum’s curator of music and the performing arts. The brass alto sax owned, ca.1947, has an engraved sterling silver bell with a floral design and Charlie Parker’s name. The King Super 20 Alto sax is as beautiful, and unique, as the man who made it sing. One of those horns, the last saxophone he owned, recently went on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. The memories were of her life with a man described as brilliant, seminal, an innovative musician who helped change the shape of jazz as the world knew it, whose soaring, intricate improvisations continue to influence musicians today. which was two horns, the contracts, the paperwork, the history and the memories.” “At every opportunity, she went back because she had to get things out of that house and what she got out of the house belonged to Bird. But my mother kept going back,” Kim Parker recalls. The now 73-year-old is Charlie Parker’s stepdaughter, and the two were fierce guardians of the memory of the man known by many as “Bird.” “She couldn’t save him in life, but she could save his remains,” says Chan Parker’s daughter Kim, who was 9 at the time. Roiling flood waters were rising in the wake of Hurricane Diane, and Parker, just months after the death of one of the fathers of bebop, was determined to get the important things out as water threatened their house located on a peninsula in Lumberville. In August of 1955, Chan Parker, the widow of legendary saxophonist Charlie Parker, was in a rowboat in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, trying to save the legacy of the love of her life.
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