Charlie Parker

Charlie Parker

Charlie Parker was a real bastard. Even his closest friends acknowledged the fact. That such a disagreeable man was, and continues to be, held in such high esteem is testament to Bird's blinding prowess. This 8-CD box encompasses not only the complete catalogs of the two tiny labels that fought over his early years, but rounds up virtually every other studio date from 1944 to '48. Dial was an eccentric label run by record store owner Ross Russell, who first recorded a stranded Bird in Los Angeles, while Savoy obsessively snapped up most every unsigned jazz artist in New York, recording Bird before his trip West on the famed session that yielded "Koko." When Bird returned to New York, the two labels continued to fight over him. Savoy recorded every take of each session, false starts and all. Producer Orrin Keepnews claims there was no choice but to include these flubbed fragments. If your sense of sanity tells you otherwise, be prepared to do some programming -- the endless retakes grate. Some are truly illuminating, yet they could have been put on a separate disc. Other than this annoyance, and the rather pedestrian packaging, what's here is the first and last word on bebop, starring Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Miles Davis, and Charles "Yardbird" Parker. In a way, the cheapness of these labels contributed to Bird's improvisational wizardry. Not wanting to pay mechanical royalties, each company encouraged the saxophonist to come up with originals. Parker would write 8-12 bars of new melody over established chord changes (dozens of tunes here seem to be based on Gershwin's "I Got Rhythm"; "Koko" uses the chords to "Cherokee") and off they'd fly. At the flush Verve label, Parker began recording standards, and it was then that his light began to dim. Here, we get Bird in his absolute prime, "Billie's Bounce," "Donna Lee" et al., his rabbit-run flurries into the upper register, that perfect alto tone, solo after solo of breathtaking genius. Jumpy, kinetic, and utterly original, no one since Louis Armstrong had done more to upend music, and Bird did it all in a 10-year whirlwind. There are two signposts for bebop -- Gillespie's "Salt Peanuts" -- and the moment Bird dropped dead at age 34. Bird's death stunned the jazz community like no event before or since, yet mixed in with the grief was the sense that after Bird, everyone could again catch their breath. "Damn," they said. "That was something."