Charlie Parker

If you really love bop, then you really love and respect Charlie Parker. And those who truly care about Charlie Parker will always be happy to augment his early work as a member of Jay McShann's orchestra and his Savoy, Dial and Mercury/Verve recordings with lesser-known jam sessions, live dates and radio broadcasts. In 2007 the Collectables budget reissue label brought out a little less than an hour's worth of Rare Recordings by Charlie Parker dating from 1947-1952. What makes a recording "rare"? To fit with that word, the material should exist off the beaten path, meaning that in this case even those who have absorbed a lot of Charlie Parker's music ought to stand a good chance of encountering some Bird they hadn't heard before. This might well be the case with recordings made by Charlie Parker and his All Stars at the MacGregor Studios in Hollywood in February 1947, with his Sextet in New York's WOR broadcast studios ten months later, or his quintet at Birdland on the same night in 1950 with two different rhythm sections, featuring trumpeter Fats Navarro only weeks before his death from heroin addiction and tuberculosis. This parcel of uncommon Bird closes with excerpts from a performance at Harlem's Rockland Palace Dance Hall, available in its entirety as the Complete Legendary Rockland Palace Concert 1952, on Jazz Classics. The Rockland recordings are particularly exciting and they really do qualify as "rare." One thing about the people who "coordinate" the Collectables reissue series: they misspell song titles. They misspell a lot of song titles! How could they allow "Moose the Mooche" to become "Moose the Moochie"? This kind of slovenliness has occurred elsewhere in the Collectables catalog. Not only does it undermine this label's credibility, it disseminates incorrect information pertaining to an already misunderstood and largely marginalized musical genre. Thanks for the rarities, but doesn't this music deserve some standard of accuracy? ~ arwulf arwulf, All Music Guide