From the archives
Geoffrey Smith on an unmissable collection celebrating the alto saxophone be-bop legend Charlie Parker
Big number anniversaries are a media gift, a chance to turn an artist into an icon, to magnify a historic talent into a must-have brand. But they can also offer an incentive to sidestep the media rush and return to the original essence of the art and talent, to rediscover the unique character of a voice which still speaks to us today, across the decades.
That’s the happy experience I’ve been having listening to a four-disc set on the Craft label, issued in honour of the centenary of alto genius Charlie Parker, the immortal ‘Bird’. The Savoy 10-Inch LP Collection (Craft CR00010) reproduces the set of recordings Parker made for the Savoy label in the mid and late 1940s, including his first epoch-making session under his own name, with Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis. In 1950, the company assembled its Parker holdings into four albums collectively titled New Sounds in Modern Music, which Craft has turned into a handsome annotated box with vintage photos.
Though the package may be aimed at lovers of retro-chic, its musical contents are a joy forever, a fresh revelation of Charlie Parker’s singular gifts. He may have been identified as the godfather of the bebop revolution, but his achievement defies categorising in any formulaic style. The passionate, inspired voice on these discs isn’t just playing bop, but defining a new, wholly personal language. Legions of bebop imitators may have tried to emulate Bird’s harmonic complexity, rhythmic swagger and blistering technique, but they couldn’t get close to the creative brilliance that poured out every time he picked up his horn.
Which is why the masterpieces from his first solo session –’Ko-ko’, ‘Now’s The Time’, ‘Billie’s Bounce’ – still convey a once-in-a-lifetime quality, as Bird startles us with the range and variety of his attack and imagination, a fiercely swinging, spontaneous logic that’s endlessly amazing. Every single track here is similarly gripping, its twists and turns sweeping us along to an exhilarating arrival.
And so much of this collection is based on the timeless blues, of which Charlie Parker was a funky, soulful master, reaching its apogee in ‘Parker’s Mood’, a kind of epitome of his art. His pianist, John Lewis, once told me that ‘everything he played was perfect’ and, 100 years on, there’s still only one Bird.