BOP AND BIRD

To Leonard Feather, the late Times jazz critic, bebop was jazz. His successor, Don Heckman, shares this same adoration (“Still Chasin’ the Bird,” Aug. 27). Jazz, however, is much more than bebop, particularly the swing music Americans enjoyed before the bebop era.

Heckman proclaims “Bird Lives!” Fortunately, so do the classic jazz tunes with their carefully crafted lyrics. This weekend, pre-bop jazz can be heard in abundance at the Los Angeles Classic Jazz Festival and at the West Coast Jazz Party in Orange County.

HUGH GLENN

East Irvine

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Special thanks to Don Heckman and The Times for remembering what would have been the great Charlie Parker’s 75th birthday. Anyone wanting to know the true definition of the word genius need only listen to such Parker classics as “Ornithology” or “Scrapple From the Apple.”

DAVE DelVAL

Dana Point

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Heckman reprinted the much disputed version of how Charlie Parker garnered his nickname “Bird.”

Seminal Los Angeles musician Buddy Collette once asked Parker--his house guest one day in 1952 or 1953--about the varied stories surrounding his name. Parker replied that, as a teen-ager in Kansas City, he used to play his horn with some other boys in a park into the early morning. The local police would hear the sounds emanating from the park, and it was common knowledge to them that “the bird is playing in the park again.” Hence Charlie (Bird) Parker.

HARVEY R. KUBERNIK

Los Angeles

Kubernik is the producer of the oral-history CD “Buddy Collette: A Jazz Audio - Biography.”