Stanley Crouch's "Kansas City Lightning," on Charlie Parker The ideal way to ingest Stanley Crouch's new book is probably on audio, late at night, while driving between the major cities of the Midwest, your headlights pushing past truck stops and dying cornfields. You've got to be willing to submit to the spell Mr. Crouch is working to cast. The book is "Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker," and it isn't yet available as a recording. Audible, please. It's going to require a charismatic speaker, a Samuel L. Jackson or a James Earl Jones or Mr. Crouch himself. "Kansas City Lightning" is all about polyrhythmic cadences and percussive thumps. It's a book about a jazz hero written in a heroic style; it's a tall tale, a bebop Beowulf. You've got to be in the mood. Mr. Crouch's sentences frequently trace a biblical arc. "They had seen the high and mighty get low-down and dirty, the low-down and dirty get high and mighty," he declaims about Kansas City jazzmen in the 1920s and "30s. They learned a great deal about what music did to women. More often he doles out vernacular pops of phrasing, of the sort now sometimes called Dan Ratherisms. Parker and his future first wife, newly in love, "stared at each other with the amazement of two moo cows watching choo-choo trains." Chicago traffic "was thick as freckles on the face of a redheaded cracker." A bedraggled Parker looks as though "he put the big T in tramp." He can "bring disorder to your border." Confronting a friend's death was "like drinking a cup of blues made of razor blades." When the music scout John Hammond saw the talent in Kansas City, Mo., "the experience flipped his Vanderbilt wig." Mr. Crouch is an essayist, novelist, columnist for The Daily News, MacArthur grant recipient, jazz purist, rap loather and jumbo-size personality. Since 1987, he has served intermittently as artistic consultant for jazz programming at Lincoln Center. If you can find a rare copy of "Ain't No Ambulances for No Nigguhs Tonight" (1969), a spoken-word recording of his early poems, you will be content for some time. "Kansas City Lightning" is ostensibly a life of Charlie Parker, the great alto-saxophone player, but it's not even close to a real biography. Mr. Crouch doesn't have the temperament of a biographer. He's worked on this book, off and on, for more than 30 years. He's done his share of interviews. But Mr. Crouch is not about getting his knees dirty, rooting around in old tax bills and manila folders and yellowing box-office receipts. He's about aesthetics and ideas. His book is a 365-page riff on Charlie Parker, on America in the first half of the 20th century and on black intellect and feeling. It worked for me, mostly. To settle in and listen to Mr. Crouch on Parker's sound is to send you racing to your CD collection or Spotify app. Here's a stretch that can stand in for many: Charlie Parker wanted to be more than good; he wanted to be different. Part of your statement was your sound, and the one he was developing struck some more conventional musicians as brittle or harsh. Parker didn't care. Mr. Crouch continues: "He needed pitches that came out of the horn quicker, that were as blunt as snapping fingers when the inspiration demanded. His tone was absolutely unorthodox, as much like a snare drum or a bongo as a voice. It was assertive, at times comic or cavalier, and though often sweet, it could also sound almost devoid of pity. One trumpeter thought it sounded like knives being thrown into the audience. Mr. Crouch is a subtle observer of Parker's way of being. "His embouchure was just like the one in the book," he notes, "a dimple on either side of his mouth." He nails his exuberance. " "The sap is flowing," he said - code for "I'm going to blow my ass off tonight." " Mr. Crouch's book will make those who come for the bald facts about Parker's life insane. For one thing, this volume barely gets its subject out of his teenage years. Parker, a heroin addict, died young, at 34 in 1955. "Kansas City Lightning" ends when he is in his early 20s and has not yet recorded any of the music that made his name. A second volume is said to be in the works.