Charlie Parker (Verve)

Album Review

If you have the original 10" LP issue of this album with the '50s David Stone Martin cover art, hang on to it (it's worth anywhere from $240 to $400!), but also acquire this greatly expanded CD version in the Verve Master Edition series. In addition to the original eight selections, recorded in 1953 with Al Haig or Hank Jones (piano), Percy Heath or Teddy Kotick (bass), and Max Roach (drums), you get an awesome variety of other Parker quartet, quintet, and septet sessions, plus extensive outtakes and false starts (grouped at the end of the disc) from the 10" LP sessions. Bird was still in marvelously inventive form in 1953, hardly ever repeating the same idea twice, clearly inspired by the propulsive Roach groove. The spectacular Buddy Rich is the disruptive drummer on "Blues [Fast]," "Celebrity," and three other cuts, one of which ("Ballade") features Coleman Hawkins. "The Bird" (1947) is lifted from The Jazz Scene anthology, and the septet tracks from 1949 have a light Afro-Cuban flavor. All of this had been previously revealed on the ten-CD Complete Charlie Parker on Verve in similarly good sound, so completists needn't bother. The sharpies at Verve do correct one egregious error from the original collector's item; the track perhaps understandably misidentified as Frank Loesser's "I Hear Music" on the LP is really Jerome Kern's "The Song Is You." ~ Richard S. Ginell, Rovi