One day in the very early 1950s a carload of musicians, driving out in the country for a gig, ran over an escaped chook - what was known in the States as a yardbird.

"Stop the car!", saxophonist Charlie Parker cried. They did, he picked it up, and that night at the musicians' boarding house, he feasted on that yardbird. From that night on he was known as Yard or Bird. The Yard got forgotten, but Bird lives.

'Bird Lives' got scrawled across walls in New York, in Chicago, in Kansas and everywhere jazz was played and loved, in the months following his sudden death in 1955. The New York coroner put his death down to pneumonia, and gave his age as between 55 and 60. In fact, Charlie Parker was just 34. In less than eight years he had stood the world of jazz on its head. With a handful of collaborators, notably Dizzy Gillespie, he had created in be-bop a new language for jazz. Jazz never sounded the same again.

This documentary traces the life of the sax virtuoso, one of the very few true geniuses of jazz, from his birth in Kansas in 1920 to that death at such an early age. He died as a result of long physical abuse, mainly from heroin, but also from alcohol - the too-common refuges of creative black people who had to deal with living in an intolerably racist society.

The program shows how he found true acceptance for a time during his two hugely successful tours of Europe, particularly in Paris. He confided to his partner, Chan Parker, that he thought he should move there. It was his loss, and ours, that he never acted on that thought.

Very little footage exists of Charlie Parker in performance. Most of this documentary is told through still images with his music, or through performances by his peers and colleagues. This is very much a factual 'life-of'; the program never adequately highlights what made his music so revolutionary. The focus is squarely on the man rather than on his legacy of music.

There's enough here to satisfy many viewers to whom Charlie Parker is a pretty well unknown quantity. But if you already know and venerate him, then you may find it goes down tracks already exceedingly well beaten. If you don't know him, go out and rent it - the man has to be remembered.

The documentary is made up of black and white archival footage from the 1940s and early 1950s, and more modern interview footage shot in colour some three decades later.

There is a disclaimer at the start of the DVD stating that some archival footage may show unavoidable wear and tear.

In fact, the older archival footage stands up well. It's the modern material filmed specifically for the documentary which is almost unwatchable. It looks as if it's been compressed to within an inch of its stretched-tape life. It's pixellated to the point of absolute shifting blockiness. People's faces look as if they're made of shifting, melting plastic. Colours and features are smeared almost to the point of disintegration. However, the archival footage is what we're most interested in seeing, and that, while not brilliant, is acceptable.

The audio, in Dolby Digital 5.1, is clear and strong. Maybe the artificial conversion to 5.1 has given it an extra resonance, since although it sounds mono for most of the time, it has a pleasing natural-sounding bandwidth which is excellent given the age of the source material.

The only extras are pretty routine full-screen trailers for other Umbrella docos on Sarah Vaughan, Thelonius Monk, Count Basie and John Coltrane.