When Charlie Parker died in a New York hotel suite in 1955, the medical examiner guessed the body was 50 or 60 years old. He was 34. This episode asks how someone lived that hard, that fast, and still built the entire genre of bebop from the ground up. We start in wide-open Kansas City, where a teenage Parker dropped out of high school, got a cymbal thrown at his feet by Jo Jones at a Count Basie jam session, and responded by practicing up to 15 hours a day in the Ozarks, a woodshedding regimen the hosts connect to the neuroscience of myelination and reflex.

The story moves through the car crash and morphine prescription that started his opiate dependency, the $9-a-week dishwashing job at Jimmy's Chicken Shack taken just to hear Art Tatum, the Cherokee breakthrough where he discovered he could build melodies on the upper intervals of a chor ...