One of the various reasons Charlie Parker's reputation continues to grow quietly is that his music also seems to be telling us something uniquely interesting about our own world of the most recent past. Thus the current public memorials in his home and adopted towns all date from the 1990s.

Charlie Parker Memorial Plaza in Kansas City opened in 1997, and was graced by a giant sculpture of Bird's head in 1999. Avenue B in Manhattan was renamed Charlie Parker Place in l992. The adjacent annual Charlie Parker Jazz Festival began in 1993. The former Avenue B "Charlie Parker Residence" was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in l994, and became "a New York City Landmark" in 1999.

Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, the 1990s mark the short happy life of the almost instantly fabled dot.com boom as well, in America and the world at large. And when you listen today to the bebop jazz that Charlie Parker did so much to pioneer, it does evoke something of the same high technological optimism in American culture that marked the heady start of the new age of the Internet.

If you are in the right mood, at least, the music itself can suggest that some crucial seeds of the 1990s tech-boom must have been planted in the 1940s and earlier 1950s, during the age of Bird's own rapid rise and fall at the most innovative edges of American popular music. And as it happens the 1940s and earlier 1950s were also key years in the early history of the computer.

The first ENIAC, or Electronic Numerical Integrator Analyzor and Computer, was completed at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering in November 1945 — more or less just as "Ko-Ko" was being recorded in New York City, some three-and-a-half months after the end of the Second World War. In 1947 (the year Bird got back on track, after six months of relaxation and healthy living in a California state hospital) Bell Telephone Laboratories developed the transistor. And then the first UNIVAC, or Universal Automatic Computer was launched in 1951, less than four years before Charlie Parker's untimely death.

All this might help explain why the bebop jazz invented in the 1940s gained some fresh attention in the 1990s. Bebop's characteristic complexity and speed, and its obsession with technical mastery, have some parallels in the new universe of the microelectronics revolution and the personal computer. Bebop jazz is a kind of music that you might guess would come out of cyberspace. (And the consummate old jazz-age entertainer Cab Calloway's 1940s complaint that bebop was "Chinese music" perhaps took out some new lease on life in the 1990s as well.)

Yet if both the technology of the 1990s and the music of the 1940s were new, the heady American technological optimism that helped float them was not. It went at least as far back as Benjamin Franklin in the late 18^th century. And among many others subsequently, American technological optimism was written about with insight by Thorstein Veblen, in a book called The Engineers and the Price System, first published in 1921 — the year after Charlie Parker was born.

It seems unlikely that Bird ever read Veblen's book. But according to Sadik Hakim (the listed piano player on the classic "Ko Ko" recording date), Charlie Parker "hated the name bebop, which was Dizzy's concoction." And, without wanting to belittle Dizzy's other talents as a trumpet-playing contributor to the music itself, it could be said that Bird was the great engineer of bebop jazz, and John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie its great business leader and main connection with the price system.

Just what Thorstein Veblen would have made of either the music or its always precarious branch of American business culture is unclear. He died in a shack in the woods near Stanford University in California, in 1929, not quite four weeks before Charlie Parker's ninth birthday. But both "Bird and Diz" were confirmed technological optimists, and shared vast enthusiasm and talent for technical mastery and artistic engineering in their new music, whatever it might be called.

It could also be said that the sudden crash of Charlie Parker, and bebop jazz too in several respects, in the middle of the 1950s, was echoed much more loudly again in the dot.com bust, right at the start of the 21^st century (with its strange international political punctuation in the 9/11 disaster of 2001). Yet the evidence remains all around us that, even with the dot.com crash at the end of the 1990s, the age of the Internet has only just begun. It has already transformed the present, and is bound to have a continuing vast and profound influence on the future.

Bebop jazz, it can be argued, remains one of the few equally vast and profound creations of modern American culture. In the 1980s Red Rodney, another of Charlie Parker's old trumpet-playing colleagues, declared that bebop is "the hardest jazz to play and still the best."

When you listen to it today — once you have finally lit your own fire, greased your skillet, and started to cook, at any rate — you think about how a culture that can create music like this must still have some enormous potential for a bright and very interesting and even possibly a brilliant future, no matter how many busts and crashes and other transient delays it meets along the way. And regardless of just how long it may or may not remain the world's single largest national economy, and its overwhelmingly largest repository of military power, of a certain technological sort.

A wider and increasing public awareness of such thoughts, in one form or another, may be the best and most optimistic explanation of why certain branches of the American people started raising public memorials to Charlie Parker in the 1990s. Nowadays his music is at last in tune with the times — as it never quite was during his own tormented life on planet earth.