CCMusic.com

If there is one figure in jazz who remains similarly inexplicable, it is Charlie Parker. Charlie Parker has contributed so much to the syntax and grammar of jazz that no contemporary jazz musician exists today who is not influenced in some way by Bird's jargon, either directly, or in echoes. Of course, every language has to be able to change with the times, otherwise it could not describe the atmosphere, the reality of the present. This mutability and the will to change is what makes Charlie Parker's dialect so special.