Charlie Parker Laura Integrale

EU-only release containing all existing broadcasts presenting Charlie Parker at the Bandbox club in New York. He is featured here in unusual contexts, with the Bill Harris/Chubby Jackson Herd and with organist Milt Buckner, as well as a whole show in a quartet format. As a bonus, we have added all existing music from a jam session recorded in 1951 at Christy's Restaurant, in Framingham, Massachusetts, as well as a rare session taped that same year at the Diplomat Hotel in New York. This collection contains Parker's only existing version of 'Your Father's Moustache', as well as all of his surviving versions of 'Caravan'.

CD configuration of the Charlie Parker LP box set released earlier in the year. The collection highlights Bird's pioneering bebop recordings for Savoy Records from 1944-1948, featuring jazz legends Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, John Lewis, Bud Powell, Max Roach and more.

Another anthology that has less value due to the exploding reissue market. These cuts were among Parker's most influential compositions and performances, but they've been reissued many times, both in anthology packages and on re-releases of their original albums. But it's part of the Essentials sampler line, and if you only want a little Parker, it's a good choice.

This LP contains two broadcasts featuring Charlie Parker at Boston's Storyville club in 1953. one set finds him accompanied by the Red Garland Trio (two years before Garland became famous playing with Miles Davis) while the other one also features trumpeter Herb Pomeroy and a trio led by pianist Sir Charles Thompson. The recording quality is just so-so but Bird was in fine form for these sessions, playing hot versions of his usual repertoire.

Verve gathers together all of the master takes of Charlie Parker's recordings with the swinging band of Afro-Cuban jazz pioneer Machito, along with ten other Latinized numbers that he cut in 1951-1952. Besides illustrating the willingness of producer Norman Granz to experiment and take Parker out of a small-group bebop straitjacket, this CD shows that Bird's improvisational style changed hardly at all in a Latin setting. He continued to run off his patented lightning bop licks over the congas and bongos and they just happened to interlock with the grooves quite snugly, although he did adapt his phrasing of the tunes themselves to suit their rhythmic lines.

The historic live Town Hall sessions by Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker from 1945 have been discovered on an acetate pressing, and are transferred with digital enhancement to CD. Why this concert was not issued initially is understandable, but Ira Gitler's informative and insightful liner notes suggest they likely were misplaced. What Gitler's essential writing also reveals is that these dates were approximate by only weeks to the original studio recordings of these classics, and there was no small amount of controversy surrounding this revolutionary bebop. Clearly bop was a vehicle for intricate melodic invention followed by lengthy soloing, aspects of which Parker with Gillespie were perfectly suited for…