Tomorrow, August, 29th is Charlie "Bird" Parker's birthday which always gets me thinkin about the "woulda-coulda" questions. I wrote a piece last year on that began something like this: I was was first introduced to Charlie "Bird" Parker on the corner of 55th and Madison Ave ...Since I got all my tunes for free, I sampled everything I could get my hands on from Dylan's Blonde on Blonde to Public Enemy's Greatest Misses LP and then there was the jazz catalogue which required some heavy lifting -- there was so much of it to ingest, I couldn't do it all in a couple of sittings, this was going to take some sort of syllabus,or so I thought...the LP "BeBop & Bird":http://www.rhino.com/store/ProductDetail.lasso?Number=70198&si=rhino is a tight intro to the sophonist here' the whole thing with a nice discography, etc...still,as always, "Bird lives on":http://chronicridicule.blogspot.com/2005/08/happy-birthday-charlie-bird-parker.html...