Bird's short but stunningly energetic and productive private life was tormented for a host of reasons. Even the sketchy story that we know about is besieged by human complexities. But as a crude first cut at one part of the truth, there were at least two birds struggling against each other inside Charlie Parker's soul.

On the one hand, there was the bad bird — a heroin junkie alcoholic con man, with an "evasive personality" that was deeply into power games. He was forever borrowing money, pawning his own and others' saxophones to pay for drugs, arrogantly tyrannizing over his wives and professional colleagues, disappearing when you needed him most, urinating in the telephone booths of bars he did not like, and generally behaving in unbearable ways.

On the other hand there was the good bird — a brilliant and highly intelligent but in some ways almost shy and humble and quite democratic musician, who was also a sensitive, kind, and loveable human being. This was the Bird who encouraged Gerry Mulligan and many more. He stood for high principles in his precarious profession, and showed an unusually passionate commitment to his work. He was in some ways spoiled by a hard-working doting mother, loved by four wives, and warmly encountered by apparent legions of other women, from many walks of life.

The bad bird, on a story he made public himself, had a lot to do with the mean streets on which Charlie Parker grew up too fast, at 18^th and Vine in Boss Tom Pendergast's wide-open Kansas City of the 1930s, also known as "the Paris of the Plains." On his own account Bird's "dissipation" began when he was "only 12 years old" — the year after he fell in love with the saxophone, listening to Rudy Vallee on the radio.

It was a good and a bad thing that the humming all-night entertainment district of the Paris of the Plains provided so many opportunities to pursue his love of the saxophone. The bad thing, on Bird's own account again, was that his troubles "all came from being introduced too early to night life." By the time he was about 15, it seems, he had become a heroin junkie. When he would try to kick the habit he turned to alcoholism for consolation.

Even the more strictly musical world which spawned the Yardbird (a nickname that ultimately appears to derive from his fondness for chicken) could be all too harsh and competitive. He was a sensitive boy who had some difficult beginnings in his chosen profession. And then his father, Charles Sr., was frequently absent and seems to have vanished entirely when Charles Jr. was about nine years old. According to the Kansas City bass player Gene Ramey, Charles Jr. was "an only child, sheltered and coddled" by his mother, and "not used to getting along with people."

His mother was always gainfully employed. She ended her working life as a qualified nurse who was "pretty well situated" (as he would put it in a radio interview). She bought him his first saxophone, and eventually paid off the mortgage on her house. But when her only son was growing up she often had to work nights. She gave him everything she could, but the family was hardly well off. Charles Jr. had to pawn a clarinet he borrowed from a friend to buy the bus ticket for his first trip to New York City, and on and on and on. Becoming a "bitter, cold, hard ... con man" was just part of his strategy for worldly success, on the model of the American dream.

It may be that the bad bird also especially owed something to Charles Parker Sr., who on one account died when he was slashed by a prostitute, in 1939 or 1940. There is evidence that Charles Jr. was troubled by such thoughts. But so little is known about his father.

Even now, not all that much more is known about his mother. Yet it seems very clear that Adelaide ("Addie") Bailey Parker had a great deal to do with the good bird. He apparently telephoned her "every weekend" for most of his adult life. The Baroness de Koenigswarter placed a call to his mother for him a few days before his death. Whatever else, Adelaide Parker recognized early on that her son had some unique talent, which deserved to be nurtured and encouraged, as best she could manage. Without her, there would likely have been no music of Charlie Parker at all.

Even the little that is known for certain about Charlie Parker's own private life also casts great doubt on the sometimes proffered extreme view that he was just a "classic psychopath," with an at best limited conscience, whose resolutely selfish personal existence was and still is redeemed only by his vast natural gifts as a musician.

There is considerable evidence that the good bird had his own great contempt for the bad bird. The good bird recurrently tried to tame and even conquer the bad bird — and he succeeded briefly once or twice. His third wife reported that he "often showed the strength to kick" his heroin habit, "cold turkey, by himself at home. But the temptations ever present in the night world of jazz always overwhelmed him." Or perhaps it was just that the bad bird was too tough and clever and strong-willed in the end for his own good.

As with other historical figures of astounding natural gifts, there seems a sense in which Bird's vast talent was finally a part of his inner torment too. In the early 1960s Dizzy Gillespie urged that Beethoven had also had a troubled private life. But who now really worries about that? Like other authentically driven artists of all times and places, Charlie Parker no doubt felt many things more intensely than most of us do. Recurrent deep feelings about the world around you can apparently trouble you deeply, as well as inspire your music.

From this angle, the very last words on the private torment may belong to another of Charles Parker Jr.'s piano-playing colleagues, John Lewis (who went on to his own stardom in the Modern Jazz Quartet, which dispensed with troublesome brilliant horn players altogether): "Bird was like fire. You couldn't get too close."