The modern jazz great Charles Parker Jr. was born in Kansas City, Kansas in 1920. After a short and tormented but stunningly productive life he died in 1955 in New York City, at the hotel suite of the Baroness Nica de Koenigswarter, a daughter of the English Rothschilds.

The tormented genius of Charlie Parker was a direct and personal influence in the early career of the trumpet player Miles Davis — considered by some today the "major musical force of the second half of the 20th century," in the USA and beyond.

The remarkable Thelonious Monk entered modern jazz at an odd angle and left the same way. Or as Francis Bacon said in the age of Shakespeare: "There is no excellent beauty that has not some strangeness in the proportion." 

Legend has it that Monk was the house piano player at Minton's in Harlem in the early 1940s, where the crucial after hours' collaboration of Bird and Diz sketched out  bebop. Monk's angular approach to harmony and rhythm, or just putting chords and lines together in unusual ways, was somehow worked into the design.

Coltrane was only six years younger than Bird, and he lived only seven years longer. He was born in North Carolina in 1926, and died in Long Island, NY in 1967.

He came from a musical family, and his father played assorted instruments. But John Coltrane settled on the saxophone in his early teens. Though only six years younger, it was his fate to come after Charlie Parker in the story of modern jazz. Coltrane's early career can be seen as a struggle to both digest and escape from Bird's influence.

BIRTH OF THE COOL REVISITED ... LEGENDS OF JAZZ WITH RAMSEY LEWIS ... DON CHEADLE AS MILES DAVIS ... CHARLIE PARKER SPECIAL ON BBC ... MONK AND COLTRANE AT CARNEGIE HALL 1957: REDISCOVERED ON TAPE ...

Birth of the Cool Revisited. If you like the kind of music that still sees its roots in the formative age of modern jazz, 1940-1970, things seem to be looking up in the spring of 2006. This past Tuesday, March 14, e.g., trumpet player Marcus Printup led members of the CNY Jazz Orchestra "through an evening devoted to recreating the landmark Miles Davis Birth of the Cool album," at the Oncenter Carrier Theater in New York.

According to local jazz disc jockey Scott McLaren, Nick "The Brownman" Ali was "born on the small Caribbean island of Trinidad, schooled in New York" and is "now based in Toronto." At 25, he is "one of the most in demand, young jazz studio trumpet players" in Canada today. Every Friday night in September 2005 the Brownman is also serving as impresario front-man for a musical retrospective called "Five Weeks for Miles." It's at the Trane Studio on Bathurst Street in Toronto, a few blocks north of the Bloor subway line.