Video: Charlie Parker Graveside Sax Salute

Yesterday around 12:30 p.m., a yakety of local saxophonists gathered around Charlie Parker’s grave in Kansas City’s Lincoln Cemetery to blow out a tribute to Bird. The day before, August 29, celebrations at the Mutual Musicians Foundation and the Jazz Museum (but mostly the Foundation) commemorated what would’ve been Parker’s 89th birthday. In the video, the saxers play a fanfare then trade solos round-robin style, beginning with local patriarch Ahmad Alaadeen.

A crowd of 60 or so people attended the brief ceremony, which is put on each year by Parker’s family and Lincoln Cemetery officials. This year, it included a poetry reading by Dan Jaffe, an explanation of the #jazzlives Twitter campaign by Dean Hampton of Jazz Ambassadors Magazine, and a reading of a mayoral proclamation by Myra Brown, Parker’s second cousin. Representatives from a Tokyo jazz magazine were present, as were these young jazzers in the making.