“A tour de force. . . . Crouch has given us a bone-deep understanding of Parker’s music and the world that produced it. In his pages, Bird still lives.” —  Washington Post A stunning   portrait of Charlie Parker, one of the most talented and influential musicians of the twentieth century, from Stanley Crouch, one of the foremost authorities on jazz and culture in America. Throughout his life, Charlie Parker personified the tortured American artist: a revolutionary performer who used his alto saxophone to create a new music known as bebop even as he wrestled with a drug addiction that would lead to his death at the age of thirty-four. Drawing on interviews with peers, collaborators, and family members, Stanley Crouch   recreates Parker’s Depression-era childhood; his early days navigating the Kansas City nightlife, inspired by lions like Lester Young and Count Basie; and on to New York, where he began to transcend the music he had mastered. Crouch reveals an ambitious young man torn between music and drugs, between his domineering mother and his impressionable young wife, whose teenage romance with Charlie lies at the bittersweet heart of this story. With the wisdom of a jazz scholar, the cultural insights of an acclaimed social critic, and the narrative skill of a literary novelist, Stanley Crouch illuminates this American master as never before. “Stanley Crouch has a store of fresh information for you in his new book about Charlie Parker (1920-55), the genius of American music universally known as Bird, and invaluable insights to offer into the meaning of Parker’s achievement. It is imperative that you come into possession of this material…” - Daily Beast “Award-winning Crouch takes a deep look at [Parker’s] rich life.” - Denver Post “Social and cultural critic, columnist and MacArthur Genius Crouch offers a mix of impressionist strokes, historical facts and context in his masterful Charlie Parker bio.” - New York Post “Meticulous and steeped in local lore. . . Feel[s] as urgent as a blast from Parker’s saxophone.” - Kansas City Star “In Crouch’s hands, the phrase that used to be ubiquitous around New York rings true: Bird lives. I hope I’m not the only one out there who is waiting with bated breath for Crouch’s next volume to see this Bird take flight.” - The Millions “An instant classic that will have wide appeal, from scholars and fans to those who may have heard Parker’s name but don’t know anything about him. In Crouch’s telling, Parker is put into rich context of life during the thirties in a place called Kansas City. . . . With a novelist’s sensibility, he creates a vivid picture of a young boy. . . . Crouch portrays Parker’s world more vividly than anything I have ever read previously. . . . Parker ‘lives’ in Crouch’s telling, backed by the most up-to-date information of his musical activies. One hopes that the second volume of Crouch’s biography does not take too long to arrive in bookstores.” - Jeff Sultanof, the Journal of Jazz Studies “An instant classic. . . . With a novelist’s sensibility . . . Crouch portrays Parker’s world more vividly than anything I have ever read previously. . . . Parker ‘lives’ in Crouch’s telling.” - Jeff Sultanof, the Journal of Jazz Studies “Capture[s] the excitement of a Charlie Parker performance, his incandescent swing, the way he took notes to places they’d never been before. . . Takes us as close as we are likely to get to the early years of a genius-in-waiting.” - Toronto Globe and Mail “Judicious, strategically crafted . . . free-flowing and severe, volatile, expansive, allusive . . . From bravura sentence to serpentine paragraph, the book is a virtuoso performance of musical-literary mimesis. . . . Kansas City Lightning provides more ideas and better writing in its 365 pages than any other book about Parker.” - New York Times Book Review “[A] meticulous biography of Parker. . . . It’s the melding of three distinctive traits that have produced Crouch’s seminal work: his subject Charlie Parker, the seed of the jazz inception, and Crouch’s finely tuned ear for prose worthy of an Art Tatum piano run or a Hot Lips Page trill. . . In Crouch’s passages, he very nearly invents a new language for discussing jazz.” - PopMatters.com “[A] meticulous biography of Parker. . . . In Crouch’s passages, he very nearly invents a new language for discussing jazz.” - Popmatters.com “Stanley Crouch is the perfect candidate to write Bird’s biography. . . . He vividly brings to life Charlie Parker’s world as much as his music or his personality. . . . In Crouch’s hands, the phrase that used to be ubiquitous around New York rings true: Bird lives. I hope I’m not the only one out there who is waiting with bated breath for Crouch’s next volume to see this Bird take flight.” - The Millions “Stanley Crouch’s soulful, poetic and often graphic Kansas City Lightning. . . reads like the jazz version of Batman Begins, with Crouch detailing the raw materials of culture, class, an