Charlie Parker

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Essential Albums

  • Best Of The Complete Savoy & Dial Studio Recordings
    Best Of The Complete Savoy & Dial Studio Recordings
    Best Of The Complete Savoy & Dial Studio Recordings

    The revolution of Charlie Parker’s music came down to two things: freedom and speed. Nobody had ever played so fast or with such intensity—nor had anyone strayed so far from the standard melodic course. There was a reason they called him Bird: He could make chaos sound not only natural but elegant, and no matter how much he looped or swooped, he always stuck his landing. To modern ears, the music Parker recorded for Savoy and Dial in the mid-to-late 1940s might sound old-fashioned. After all, his style—fluid, intricate, effortless—rhymes so closely with our public conception of jazz that its radicalism can go unnoticed, the way one might overlook a skyscraper or suspension bridge. At the time, the dominant style was big band, in which players were treated like pigments on a palette, applied at the careful discretion of the bandleader. Parker’s music, by comparison, was loose and informal, built on scraps of guidance that players were expected to build on, deviate from, or defy as suited their genius. In both cases, the individual mattered; the difference is that, with Parker’s approach, that individual wrote their own script—and wrote it in real time. Miles Davis (“Moose the Mooche”), Dizzy Gillespie (“Koko”)—if you want to know where they started out, it’s here. Not only did the sessions define bebop (a term Parker didn’t like), they captured the spirit of a world in which the machines were smarter, the weapons deadlier and the pace and feel of life were verging on abstraction. As the drummer Kenny Clarke later put it, Parker was running the same way everyone else was—he was just way out ahead.

  • The Magnificent Charlie Parker
    The Magnificent Charlie Parker
    The Magnificent Charlie Parker

    1955

  • Bird and Diz (Expanded Edition)
    Bird and Diz (Expanded Edition)
    Bird and Diz (Expanded Edition)

    By the time Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie recorded the sessions that became Bird and Diz, the two had been playing together for about a decade—first in Earl Hines’ big band, and later in the small groups incubating bebop in Harlem during the mid-1940s. By Gillespie’s own admission, Parker was the sound’s architect—not that Parker had found many players who could hold their own with him, especially at the speed and complexity of stuff like “Leap Frog”. In hindsight, part of what made Parker so remarkable, as both composer and soloist, was how easily he balanced the abstractions of modernism with the familiar comforts of the blues (a talent best evidenced here by “Mohawk” and “Bloomdido”). And as groundbreaking as Parker’s sessions for Savoy and Dial were, his albums for Verve—present material included—benefitted from a quality of sound and attendance to production (courtesy of Norman Granz) that you wish all of his work had received. Then there’s the unusual inclusion of Thelonious Monk, whose slanted rhythms and melodic pratfalls provide a kind of slapstick counterpart to Parker’s finesse—the drizzle of lemon that makes you pucker, then smile (“My Melancholy Baby”).

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About Charlie Parker

Sax titan Charlie Parker, a.k.a. Bird, was one of the most wildly innovative figures in not only jazz but all of American musical history. With bold new ideas about the basic relationship between harmony, melody and improvisation, he helped reinvent the basic building blocks of music itself in the ’40s, doing more than just about anybody else to establish jazz’s bebop movement in the process. Born in Kansas in 1920 and raised in Missouri, he picked up the sax as a child and spent years practicing ceaselessly. Influenced by swing bandleaders like Count Basie, he began playing in touring regional “territory bands” in the late ’30s before relocating to New York City in 1939. By the early ’40s, Parker was rewriting the musical rulebook—alongside fellow pioneers like Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie and Max Roach—and blazing new trails with bebop. His sax firestorms represented a new musical language, eventually earning him international celebrity status through milestones like “Koko”, “Ornithology” and “Yardbird Suite”. The 1949-’50 orchestrated recordings Charlie Parker With Strings even made Parker a kind of pop star. Sadly, he was bedeviled by heroin and alcohol addiction, which led to his death in 1955. Parker’s already considerable legend grew even larger posthumously (there was even a Clint Eastwood-directed biopic, Bird, in 1988), making him one of jazz’s most influential instrumentalists.

BORN
29 August 1920
GENRE
Jazz

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