First Recordings!
Onyx 221

Charlie Parker on Dial
Spotlite 101-106

Bird/The Savoy Recordings
Savoy SJL 2201

The Verve Years [1948-50]
Verve 2-2501

The Verve Years [1950-51]
Verve 2-2512

Charlie Parker is one of the great legends of jazz, and, as many commentators have noted, it is difficult to think of his music without considering the larger-than-life image of this aggressive, kindly, irresponsible, suicidal, potent creative genius who liked to shop for toys for his adopted child and with whom no one could afford to be friends, who died when he was thirty-five looking twenty years older, and whose face as it is captured is photographs can be curiously attractive or puffy, sick-looking, and repellent. He was the junkie bebopper who condemned dope and had none of the fun associated with the hip generation. He was a saint to many, including one Dean Benedetti, who followed Parker from club to club recording his solos by devious means, interested only in Bird’s song, ready to spend an evening in the grubby men’s room of a club in which he had surreptitiously set up his equipment, or to drill a hole in a roof through which he could lower his microphone.

When Parker died, one of his recording companies, Savoy, decided to put out everything he had recorded for them: master takes, alternate takes of tunes, beginnings—anything with a scrap of the Bird. Listeners to these recordings tense themselves for the shrill whistle Parker used to stop an unsatisfactory performance. And on one album, the disc jockey, Al Jazzbo Collins, tells us at length someone was responsible for Bird’s death, and implies whoever that may be, it wasn’t Al Jazzbo Collins.

It is difficult for a bop fan to imagine, but there was a time when Charlie Parker’s personality was unpublicized, a time when his music made its own way. John Lewis tells (in Ross Russell’s Bird Lives) of the first time he heard Parker. He was listening over the radio to an unknown alto player with the Jay McShan bad, as Kansas City organization that billed itself as The Band That Jumped the Blues: “The alto solos on those broadcasts opened up a whole new world of music for me. I’d known Jay McShann from the time he used to barnstorm in the Southwest and about his band, but the alto saxophone was new and years ahead of anybody in jazz. He was into a whole new system and time.”

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