“Heroin was our badge,” said Red Rodney, a trumpeter who toured with Bird and was one of the few white musicians on the bepop scene. “Hipsters used heroin. Squares didn’t. Heroin gave us membership in a unique club, and for this membership we gave up everything else in the world. Every ambition. Every desire. Everything.”

Of all of the junkies in jazz, Charlie Parker was supreme. He was, in Miles Davis’s estimation, the greatest saxophone player of all time, yet nevertheless “a selfish motherfucker” whose profligate genius lent “horse,” as it was called then, its first cachet. Though he was always telling people in the pursuit of cool not to do what he did, many musicians and others became junkies just to emulate Bird.

“For urban black people of his generation, Charlie was a genuine culture hero,” writes Ross Russell. “The revolutionary nature of his music was explicit. Implicit in his lifestyle was defiance of the white establishment.” A survival mechanism that had been passed down from the days of slavery, cool in the form of studied indifference was the only way in which a hip African American could stifle rage at the same time that he or she was expressing it.

One night, in the middle of a set at the Argyle Lounge, the hippest club in Chicago at the time, Bird came down from the bandstand, walked right past the bathroom door to the telephone booth, unzipped his fly in full view of the club’s owner and patrons, and relieved himself before returning to the stage to blow. At a time when even looking at a white woman could get a black man killed in many parts of the country, Parker was going out with two at once: Doris Sydnor, an unassuming hatcheck girl at the Spotlite Club, and Chan Richardson, a pretty ex-dancer raised on the fringes of New York showbiz, with whom he moved to the Lower East Side and had a couple of kids.

Billie Holiday, circa 1945.