Charlie Parker

Dial's first Parker LP gathers material from multiple California sessions spanning 1946 and 1947. The earliest tracks feature Miles Davis on trumpet with a young rhythm section including Arvin Garrison on guitar. The later sessions, recorded after Parker's breakdown and recovery at Camarillo State Hospital, bring Howard McGhee on trumpet and a different energy: looser, sunnier, though no less technically ferocious.

The playing is magnificent even by Parker's standards. "Ornithology" and "A Night in Tunisia" are here in their Dial versions, and the speed and clarity of Parker's lines remain breathtaking decades later. Dodo Marmarosa's piano is elegant and precise across both eras of the sessions, a perfect foil for Parker's wildness. The February 1947 tracks with Barney Kessel on guitar and Wardell Gray on tenor have a particular openness to them.

As a ten-inch LP compilation, the sequencing is arbitrary and the packaging minimal, pulling from sessions with different personnel. But the music itself is beyond criticism. If you come to these recordings knowing only the Savoy dates, the California Parker is a revelation: the same genius, a different light.

Ross Russell, Dial's owner, had the good sense to save the alternate takes. This first volume collects rejected masters from the 1946 and 1947 sessions, and the revelation is how different each take could be. Parker was not a musician who played the same solo twice. Every take is a new improvisation, a new set of choices made in real time, and the alternates often contain ideas that are as striking as anything on the issued masters.

The 1946 material with Miles Davis is particularly valuable. Davis was twenty at the time, still finding his voice, and you can hear him thinking through each phrase in a way that the older musicians did not need to. The contrast with Parker is instructive: Bird already fully formed, Miles still becoming himself.

For the dedicated listener this is essential. For the newcomer, start with the issued masters first. But come back to these takes once you know the originals, because the differences illuminate everything about how Parker's mind worked.

This is the session. November 26, 1945, at the WOR Studios in New York, the date that produced "Ko Ko," "Now's the Time," "Billie's Bounce," and "Thriving on a Riff." If you had to choose one recording session to represent the birth of bebop, this would be it. The ten-inch LP that Savoy assembled from these tracks is the single most important jazz record of the 1940s.

"Ko Ko" is the centerpiece: Parker's solo over the changes of "Cherokee" at a tempo that should be impossible, every note placed with absolute precision. Dizzy Gillespie plays piano on some tracks because the pianist originally booked for the session could not handle the tempos. Miles Davis, at nineteen, plays the melody statements with a fragile beauty that makes Parker's ferocity even more striking by contrast.

Max Roach's drumming is the other revelation. He is not accompanying Parker; he is in conversation with him, accent for accent, anticipation for anticipation. The rhythm section that would define the next decade of jazz is already fully operational. As an LP, Savoy's packaging is utilitarian, but the music inside is the most consequential jazz ever recorded.

The second volume draws from the later Savoy sessions, 1947 and 1948, and the quintet is now Parker's regular working band: Miles Davis on trumpet, Duke Jordan on piano, Tommy Potter on bass, Max Roach on drums. This is the group that played the clubs every night, and you can hear the tightness of a band that knows each other's habits to the note.

"Donna Lee," credited to Parker though Miles Davis later claimed authorship, is one of the most demanding bebop melodies ever composed, played here at a speed that makes even experienced musicians sweat. "Chasin' the Bird" and "Cheryl" are equally commanding. Duke Jordan's comping is elegant and unobtrusive, creating a harmonic carpet that Parker runs across without ever looking down.

Bud Powell appears on a few tracks, and when he does the temperature rises. Powell played with a ferocity that matched Parker's own, and the two together generate a kind of intensity that Duke Jordan, for all his elegance, never quite reached. This second volume is marginally less essential than the first only because the November 1945 session is so overwhelmingly important. But the playing here is at the same level.

Volume three centers on the September 1948 Savoy sessions, Parker's last recordings for the label. John Lewis replaces Duke Jordan at the piano, and the change is immediately audible: Lewis brings a classical poise, a more deliberate harmonic sensibility, that gives these tracks a slightly different color from the Jordan dates.

"Parker's Mood" is the masterpiece here, three minutes and four seconds of the most perfectly constructed blues solo in the history of the alto saxophone. Every phrase flows into the next with a logic that sounds inevitable in retrospect but was entirely spontaneous. Lewis's introduction sets the tone: spare, melancholy, almost hymn-like. Then Parker enters and the emotion deepens into something that words cannot really describe.

"Marmaduke," "Steeplechase," and "Merry-Go-Round" are also present, all of them first-rate quintet performances. But "Parker's Mood" is the reason this LP exists, and it is reason enough. If you own one Parker ten-inch LP, make it this one.

The second volume of Dial alternates digs deeper into the 1947 sessions, drawing from both the California and New York recordings. The alternate take of "Embraceable You" is legendary among Parker collectors: where the issued master is lyrical and flowing, this take builds the melody from a completely different set of fragments, as though Parker had dismantled the song and reassembled it from different parts.

The California tracks with Howard McGhee and Wardell Gray have a warmth and relaxation that the New York sessions sometimes lack. Dodo Marmarosa's piano playing is exceptionally good throughout, harmonically adventurous in a way that complemented Parker's lines without competing with them.

For the completist, this is essential. For the casual listener, the alternates are a curiosity rather than a necessity. But Parker was never casual about anything he played, and even the rejected takes contain moments of invention that most musicians spend entire careers trying to reach.

Released shortly after Parker's death in March 1955, this twelve-inch LP compilation gathers the cream of the Savoy sessions onto a single disc. "Ko Ko," "Now's the Time," "Billie's Bounce," "Donna Lee," "Chasin' the Bird," "Parker's Mood" are all here. This is the definitive Savoy Parker collection, and for many listeners it remains the single best entry point into his recorded legacy.

The sequencing, running roughly chronologically from the 1944 Tiny Grimes session through to the 1948 dates with John Lewis, tells a story of a musician and a movement growing in real time. You can hear the rhythm section evolving from track to track, the bebop language becoming more fluent with each session. Miles Davis's growth over these four years alone is a jazz education.

Savoy's twelve-inch LP reissues of the mid-1950s were a commercial masterstroke: they caught the audience that the ten-inch LPs had missed and gave the bebop recordings their definitive presentation. The Memorial volumes outsold everything else in Savoy's catalog for years. The music justified the sales.

The second Memorial volume collects the remaining Savoy masters not already used on Volume 1, plus some alternate takes. It is inevitably a step below the first volume because the most iconic performances have already been claimed, but the playing is no less extraordinary. "Barbados," "Ah-Leu-Cha," "Constellation," and "Perhaps" are all first-rate quintet performances.

The alternate takes included here are among the strongest arguments for the alternate-take concept in jazz. Parker's second take of "Perhaps" is, to some ears, more lyrical than the issued version. The alternate "Constellation" reveals a different structural approach, with Parker opening from a different point in the harmonic cycle and building an entirely new architecture from there.

Duke Jordan and John Lewis split piano duties, and both are excellent. Jordan is the more intuitive player, Lewis the more architecturally precise. Tommy Potter and Max Roach remain the constants, and their playing across all these sessions is a model of how a bebop rhythm section should function: responsive, propulsive, and never in the way.

Another twelve-inch compilation from Savoy's post-Parker marketing push, and another essential collection. There is inevitable overlap with the Memorial volumes and the earlier New Sounds ten-inch LPs, but the programming here is excellent: a coherent portrait of Parker at his most inventive, drawing from the full span of the Savoy sessions.

The title is not hyperbole. Parker's genius was of the kind that reshapes everything around it. Before these recordings, the jazz vocabulary had one set of possibilities; after them, it had another, vastly larger set. Listening to "Ko Ko" or "Parker's Mood" or "Donna Lee" in sequence, you can hear ideas entering the language in real time, ideas that every jazz musician born after 1945 would eventually have to reckon with.

The overlap between the various Savoy compilations can be confusing for collectors, but for the listener it hardly matters: any one of these twelve-inch LPs will give you the core of Parker's contribution to recorded jazz. The Genius of Charlie Parker is as good a single-disc summary as exists, and the sound quality on the original Savoy pressings is better than you might expect from mid-1940s studio recordings.