In the early 1950s, the percussionist Ray Barretto and a group of his musician friends headed uptown to a ballroom in Harlem with the intention of hearing Charlie Parker. When the legendary saxophonist was late, as was often the case, Mr. Barretto and his friends took the opportunity to climb on the bandstand and to begin playing, thus serving as an impromptu opening act. When Parker at last arrived, the youngsters duly left the stage. But as he started to carry off his congas, Mr. Barretto felt a hand on his shoulder: Charlie Parker was inviting him to stay on the stand and play with his quintet. “It was,” Mr. Barretto said, “like being touched by the hand of God.”

Mr. Barretto recalled this incident earlier this month at the International Association for Jazz Education conference, where he was speaking on a panel along with five other recipients of this year’s National Endowment of the Arts Jazz Masters Awards. Each was asked to talk about a life-changing epiphany, and nearly all of them selected the moment they first heard Parker (1920-55) as the most significant experience of their careers.

The clarinetist Buddy DeFranco recalled being so blown away by the complexity and intensity of Bird’s music that he couldn’t sleep for a week. Likewise Tony Bennett, the only 2006 NEA Jazz Master not on the panel, once told me that the first time he heard Parker, he was so overcome with emotion that he became ill and actually threw up in the alley behind the club.

Parker, in short, is one of those giants who deserve continual study – a new book every decade or so is hardly too much. Jazz fans have been waiting close to two decades for Stanley Crouch’s Parker biography, but in the meantime, Brian Priestley’s “Chasin’ the Bird: The Life and Legacy of Charlie Parker” (Oxford University Press, 256 pages, $28) serves as the best overall book on Parker since Gary Giddins’s photo-driven “Celebrating Bird” of 1987.

Parker’s life was tragically brief and this is a brief book, expanded from an even shorter one originally published in 1984. But its 60-page discography is the most comprehensive Parker compendium yet published.

Mr. Priestley, an English musicologist, has listened to and listed everything, including all the rare, noncommercial material that’s come to light in the last 20 years: the Chicago hotel room recordings of 1943, in which Bird plays tenor; the Jay McShann Savoy Ballroom broadcast of 1942; the privately recorded Kansas City date with just guitar and drums from 1943; the June 22, 1945, Town Hall concert released last summer; and the 270 or so Parker solos (discovered and only recently issued by Mosaic Records) recorded in 1947 and ’48 by amateur engineer Dean Benedetti – certainly the most fanatically devoted of Parker’s followers.

These are not all analyzed at length, but Mr. Priestley places them, for the first time, in the context of Parker’s career. In so doing, he contributes significant pieces to the larger puzzle depicting Parker’s role in the creation of modern jazz.

Indeed, Mr. Priestley offers excellent analysis of the technical aspects of Parker’s playing, explaining in detail what made his music so remarkable. Using musical examples and transcriptions, he illustrates what Parker was able to achieve by focusing on the so-called higher intervals of a chord change. He also details Parker’s capacity for enlivening a solo by repeating brief signature phrases in different registers.

“Chasin’ the Bird” is less anecdotal than Robert Reisner’s “Bird: The Legend of Charlie Parker,” which was primarily an oral history, and contains less of a personal agenda than the largely fictional “Bird Lives!” by Ross Russell. Both Mr. Reisner and Russell were producers who worked with Parker in various capacities, and in his book, Russell seemed determined to depict Parker as a manipulative, exploitive junkie with no qualms about taking advantage of people to further his own ends – an impression that is not seconded in most other accounts, and certainly not by Mr. Priestley.

Mr. Priestley hasn’t done all that much primary research of the kind Mr. Crouch undoubtedly will present, but he seems to have factored in every piece of jazz literature with a Parker reference. He also makes extensive use of the memoirs of two of the saxophonist’s closest associates: his collaborator, Miles Davis, and Chan Richardson Parker, the most visible of his four wives. Richardson’s memoir shows that Parker’s early death was hastened not only by drugs and drink, which he had been using less of in his last years, but by a deep depression that set in after the death of their 2-year-old daughter in 1954.

The one aspect of Parker’s legacy Mr. Priestley overlooks is the sociological aspect of the bebop Bird pioneered. Parker and his generation of modern jazzmen were the first vernacular American musicians to establish themselves as artists making music for serious listening rather than for dancing or partying.Yet even Parker’s partner, Dizzy Gillespie, acted like more of an old-school entertainer in the mold of Louis Armstrong or Cab Calloway. Parker’s stage deportment – as someone who just stood there and played, rather like a classical virtuoso – pointed the way to the subsequent career of his protege, Miles Davis, and to Davis’s own later collaborator, John Coltrane.

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The Jenkins Johnson Gallery is currently holding an exhibition of the African-American photographer Roy DeCarava. This is a well-rounded collection of Mr. DeCarava’s work, including many of his street scenes and portraits of people beyond the music world. But Mr. DeCarava is primarily known for his amazing shots of black musicians, and the curators decided to focus on two of Mr. DeCarava’s key subjects: Coltrane and Billie Holiday. In both cases, Mr. DeCarava shows sides of those two iconic figures that I’ve never seen before.

There are several images of Holiday in performance, looking, as she usually did, as if she were channeling some great spirit from beyond. But there are more pictures of Lady Day relaxing, talking, and having a low-key good time at Braddock’s, an uptown bar where she and the photographer went one night after she finished work. Rather than making her look like the dark melancholy angel she is normally portrayed as, Mr. DeCarava makes her come off more sublimely than I have ever seen her.

The shots of Coltrane are laid out from left to right in a way that suggests the mounting power and passion of a Coltrane solo. Mr. DeCarava first gives us Coltrane from the back, walking to a gig with his sax case in one hand and what looks like a wooden flute (which, as far as I know, he never played) in the other. There are also contemplative shots of Coltrane listening to his band, which in this case happens to be his unrecorded quartet with pianist Steve Kuhn from 1961. The shots of Coltrane actually playing get more and more intense, until Mr. DeCarava starts to use visual aids – a double light source, deliberate blurriness – to suggest the depth and force of Coltrane’s own playing.

The capper is something I thought I would never see: ‘Trane with a sublimely serene expression on his face as he is being hugged – that’s right, I said hugged – by fellow tenor giant Ben Webster.