According to his fourth wife, Charlie "Bird" Parker — the single most important inventor of modern jazz ("Among the masters he was the master" - MILES DAVIS) — did not want to be buried in Kansas City.

As has been pointed out, in the most exact sense he was not. Today he lies in the Lincoln Cemetery in Blue Summit, just outside the municipal boundaries of Kansas City, Missouri. But Parker was born in Kansas City, Kansas. For the most part he grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, next door. What an earlier and more romantic (if also more harsh and repressive) age called the "Paris of the Plains," in the 1920s and 1930s, was the strangely fertile point of departure for his ultimate career in New York City, as certainly one of the greatest and most interesting musicians that America has yet produced.

What happens when you take a short trip to Kansas City, Missouri today, to see what has become of the harshly romantic Midwest urban neighborhoods where Charlie Parker spent most of his first 20 years, in the first half of the 20th century? The short answer is that you have a good time, and learn a few new things too. Inevitably, the real old world of Charlie Parker finally eludes you, but the trip is interesting all the same.