Search - Charlie Parker :: Bebop & Bird 2

A reasonable introduction if you can find it cheap

bukhtan | Chicago, Illinois, USA | 10/26/2006

(4 out of 5 stars)

"This CD recycles some of the old Dial recordings, roughly half studio and half live recordings. These have gone through many issues and I'm not sure who owns them; I first heard them back in the Seventies on a two-LP set, I think a Pablo lease it must have been. Now, of course, they are being bootlegged by burnover outfits.

Some of the studio tracks offer more than one take, always pleasurable and instructive with Parker, who never played the same solo twice and whose improvisation went beyond improvisation to become spontaneous composition, just as memorable as anything anyone ever sweated and agonized over, thirty bars in thirty hours, in written notation. These studio tracks come from 1946-1947, Bird's peak, in most people's estimation.

The live tracks, recorded at the Rockland in Harlem in 1952 at a benefit concert for an imprisoned American Communist are a bit lighter, but still exhilarating. The sound is poor, but alto picks up well under the worst of conditions (people yelling, junk banging around) and with bad equipment (don't know what they were using, but it sure wasnt' those good acetates they were using for the recently released Uptown Jazz Town Hall concert). Bird, of course, played well in bad conditions (such as smoky club dates) and all real Parker fans get used to bad recordings.

These issues have been re-released since in somewhat better sound, but I do believe that this disc would sufficiently prove, to a neophyte, the second half of Miles' dictum: "jazz history? four words: Louis Armstrong Charlie Parker"."

Sweet charlie parker

Rockman | dallas,Texas | 02/08/2000

(5 out of 5 stars)

"despite the turmoil of his life the voice is here and in contact with that place bird found of both rare sweetness and brilliant melancholy.the studio sessions are timeless while the live tracks are rich despite their technical drawbacks."