Charlie Parker

This Dial LP gathers takes from three 1947 sessions, all made after Parker's release from Camarillo State Hospital. Two are from Los Angeles: a February 19 quartet date with Erroll Garner, Red Callender and Doc West, where Earl Coleman sings "Dark Shadows," and the February 26 New Stars date with Howard McGhee on trumpet that produced "Relaxin' at Camarillo" and "Carvin' the Bird." The third is the October 28 New York quintet with Miles Davis, Duke Jordan, Tommy Potter and Max Roach, heard here on "Bongo Bop."

The playing is magnificent even by Parker's standards, and the speed and clarity of his lines remain breathtaking decades later. "Blowtop Blues" is not a separate tune but a retitled take of "Cool Blues" from the Garner date. Dodo Marmarosa's piano on the New Stars tracks is elegant and precise, a perfect foil for Parker's wildness, and those February 26 tracks with Barney Kessel on guitar and Wardell Gray on tenor have a particular openness to them.

As a compilation of alternate takes, 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 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 1947 material with Miles Davis is particularly valuable. Davis was twenty-one 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," and "Warmin' Up 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 built around 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 Bud Powell, the pianist booked for the session, had gone to Philadelphia, and he takes the trumpet on "Ko Ko" because Miles would not tackle it. 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 Savoy sessions recorded in 1945 and 1947, and only the December 1947 Detroit tracks feature the steady quintet of Miles Davis on trumpet, Duke Jordan on piano, Tommy Potter on bass and 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.

"Billie's Bounce" and "Cheryl" are equally commanding. Bud Powell's comping on "Cheryl" 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.

"Bluebird," "Bird Gets the Worm," "Steeplechase," and "Perhaps" 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 draws on the 1946 and 1947 sessions, from both the California and New York recordings.

The California tracks, with Miles Davis and Lucky Thompson in 1946 and Erroll Garner's trio in 1947, have a warmth and relaxation that the New York sessions sometimes lack. Dodo Marmarosa's piano playing on the 1946 septet tracks is exceptionally good, 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 alternate and incomplete takes from the 1947 and 1948 Savoy sessions onto a single disc, with only a few of the issued masters among them. "Bird Gets the Worm," "Constellation," "Ah-Leu-Cha," "Marmaduke," "Parker's Mood" are all here, most of them in alternate takes rather than the issued versions. It is a record for listeners who already know the issued masters.

The sequencing, running roughly chronologically from the 1947 quintet sessions 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 this period 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 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," "Marmaduke," "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.

Bud Powell and John Lewis split most of the piano duties, and both are excellent. Max Roach remains the one constant across these sessions, and his playing throughout is a model of how a bebop drummer 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 "Chasing the Bird" 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.