Cinema: More Than One Note at a Time BIRD Directed

by Clint Eastwood; Screenplay by Joel Oliansky

Charlie Parker could not resist temptation. Bad ones (drugs, alcohol, women who were not his wife) and good ones (the improvisation no one had ever dared, around the chord progressions few had ever heard) were all the same to him, something he had to try. Bird, the movie based on the great sax man's short, messy, indispensable life as one of the founding innovators of modern jazz, knows better. It surrenders to the right things, his compositions and performances, reconstructed with compelling authenticity by music supervisor Lennie Niehaus. And it repels the wrong things, the damp pity and even damper piety...

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