Charles Parker Jr. was born August 29, 1920, in Kansas City, Kansas, and raised across the state line in Kansas City, Missouri, the only child of Charles Parker Sr., a Pullman waiter, pianist, and vaudeville singer and dancer, and Adelaide "Addie" Bailey Parker, who worked night shifts for Western Union. He began on alto saxophone around age eleven, purchased by his mother, and joined the Lincoln High School band under Alonzo Lewis at fourteen, where a young trombonist named Robert Simpson gave him his first real instruction in improvisation. He withdrew from school in December 1935 to pursue music full time. An early, formative humiliation came at a jam session at a Kansas City club when he lost track of the chord changes and drummer Jo Jones threw a cymbal at his feet to drive him off the bandstand; rather than quit, Parker reportedly practiced up to fifteen hours a day for the next several years, developing the harmonic fluency that would define him.

In 1938 he joined pianist Jay McShann's territory band, making his professional recording debut with the group in 1940 and picking up the nickname "Yardbird," soon shortened to "Bird." He moved to New York in 1939, working odd jobs including dishwashing at Jimmie's Chicken Shack, where he heard pianist Art Tatum play nightly. Alto saxophonist Buster Smith took him in for six months and gave him band work. Practicing "Cherokee" with guitarist William "Biddy" Fleet, Parker discovered that he could use the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line over appropriately altered harmony, the technical breakthrough at the root of his mature style. Back in Kansas City with McShann in 1940, trumpeter Bernard Anderson introduced him to Dizzy Gillespie; the two quickly recognized a shared musical direction. Parker left McShann's band in 1942 and spent roughly a year in Earl Hines's orchestra, which also carried Gillespie, before an American Federation of Musicians recording ban left most of this formative period undocumented. Late-night sessions at Clark Monroe's Uptown House and Minton's Playhouse in Harlem, alongside Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, guitarist Charlie Christian, and drummer Kenny Clarke, became the incubator for what would be named bebop.

The new music reached record for the first time in February 1945, when Parker joined a Gillespie-led sextet with pianist Al Haig, bassist Curly Russell, and drummer Sidney Catlett for the Guild Records session that produced "Salt Peanuts," "Hot House," and "Groovin' High." On June 22, 1945, the two co-led a concert at New York's Town Hall (not commercially released until a 2005 archival issue). Then, on November 26, 1945, Parker led his own record date for Savoy, billed as Charlie Parker's Reboppers, with Gillespie and a nineteen-year-old Miles Davis sharing the trumpet chair, Russell on bass, and Max Roach on drums. The session, advertised at the time as "the greatest jazz session ever held," produced "Ko-Ko," "Billie's Bounce," and "Now's the Time," among the foundational recorded documents of bebop. A disastrous December 1945 booking at Billy Berg's club in Los Angeles left Parker stranded on the West Coast; he cashed his return ticket for heroin and stayed. A chaotic, alcohol-fueled July 1946 session for the independent Dial label, capturing a visibly disintegrating "Lover Man," was followed within days by a breakdown, a brief arrest, and six months' commitment to Camarillo State Mental Hospital. He returned to recording in 1947 in improved health, cutting "Relaxin' at Camarillo" as a direct reference to the stay.

Back in New York from 1947, Parker recorded prolifically for Savoy and Dial, leading a quintet built around Miles Davis and Max Roach with, in rotation, pianists Duke Jordan and Bud Powell and bassist Tommy Potter, producing "Donna Lee," "Chasin' the Bird," "Scrapple from the Apple," "Embraceable You," and "Bird of Paradise," among dozens of others. Heroin use resumed and never fully stopped. Signing with producer Norman Granz's Mercury, Clef, and later Verve labels opened new settings: a November 30, 1949 date pairing Parker with a mixed string and chamber ensemble arranged by Jimmy Carroll became Charlie Parker with Strings, a commercial and critical landmark that placed his sound against oboe and violins on "Just Friends" and "April in Paris." In December 1950 he recorded the Afro-Cuban Jazz Suite as featured soloist with Machito's orchestra under Chico O'Farrill's arrangement, and that same year cut Bird and Diz with Gillespie and, in one of their rare joint studio appearances, Thelonious Monk on piano.

Parker's Carnegie Hall and Jazz at the Philharmonic appearances under Granz's promotion, and the 1949 opening of the Broadway club Birdland, named in his honor, cemented his stature even as his health and reliability declined. On May 15, 1953, he joined Gillespie, Bud Powell, bassist Charles Mingus, and Max Roach for a concert at Massey Hall in Toronto, billed afterward as "the Quintet of the Year"; because of a contractual conflict Parker was credited on the original release as "Charlie Chan." Mingus recorded and released the concert on his own Debut label as Jazz at Massey Hall, one of the few surviving documents of Parker and Gillespie together at full strength on a concert stage. Parker's final years were marked by worsening health, a bleeding ulcer, and advancing cirrhosis; the death of his two-year-old daughter Pree in 1954 devastated him, and he attempted suicide twice that year. He played his last engagement at Birdland on March 4, 1955. Eight days later, on March 12, 1955, he died in the Stanhope Hotel suite of his friend Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter while watching television, officially of lobar pneumonia and a bleeding ulcer; the coroner mistook his 34-year-old body for that of a man in his fifties. He was buried in Kansas City's Lincoln Cemetery. Graffiti reading "Bird Lives" appeared on New York walls within days.

Parker's playing fused blues-rooted phrasing from his Kansas City upbringing with a harmonic vocabulary no saxophonist had previously commanded: rapid passing chords, altered extensions, and chord substitutions delivered at tempos and with a rhythmic freedom that redefined what improvisation could sound like. He absorbed the light tone and long, legato lines of Lester Young as a teenager before developing a harder, brighter alto sound of his own, and he built new melodies over the chord changes of existing standards and blues forms, a practice known as writing "contrafacts," turning "How High the Moon" into "Ornithology" and "I Got Rhythm" into "Moose the Mooche." Alongside Dizzy Gillespie he is credited as bebop's co-founder, and his vocabulary of eighth-note lines, upper-structure harmony, and rhythmic displacement became, within a decade, the working language of virtually every serious jazz improviser regardless of instrument. Miles Davis, who played at his side through the mid-to-late 1940s, later said the history of jazz could be told in four words: Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker. Four of his recordings, "Ko-Ko," "Ornithology," Jazz at Massey Hall, and Charlie Parker with Strings, are inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, and the Library of Congress added "Ko-Ko" to the National Recording Registry in 2002.