Charlie "Bird" Parker:

Genius African-American Jazz saxophonist and composer. In 1953, he was 32, and best described as "bloated and disheveled". Looking much older than his age, he had been a heroin addict and drinker since a he was 17. A bearish figure, Bird was many things to many people, either generous with a loud laugh or quick to anger and draw a knife. His intense playing however was often offset by an impassive face.

By 1953, he and his wife Chan Richardson, lived in New York's East Village and had a son, Baird, a daughter Kim, from Richardson's previous relationship, and a daughter, Pree, whose death in 1954 at the age of two was such a blow to Parker that it marked a steep decline in his health and an attempted suicide. At this time Ralph Ellison described Bird as “…watching a man dismember himself with a razor blade…” A year later in March 1955 he died in a friend's apartment. His official cause of death was pneumonia  and bleeding ulcers but it is thought his years of drug and alcohol abuse brought about his early demise. It is often remarked that at his death the coroner mistook the 34 year-old Parker for a man between 50 and 60 years of age.

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