Charlie Parker - The Charlie Parker Collection 1941-54 (2021)

Charlie Parker was without doubt one of the most important and influential musicians in the entire history of jazz, as a pioneering and innovative alto saxophonist during the bebop era, as a composer of some of the enduring modern jazz standards, and as a bandleader and catalyst in a remarkable range of musical settings during a career that was all too brief, cut short by an early death as a result of the excesses of his pressurised lifestyle. Coming to the fore in the early 1940s, he was an early collaborator of like-minded luminaries such as Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis, and over the next decade produced a substantial and extraordinary body of recorded work. This great-value 137-track 6-CD set comprises some interesting early recordings with other leaders, and then a significant proportion of his recordings as a leader and as a prominent member of other leaders’ bands, working in a variety of formats from quartets and quintets, through to noted recordings with strings. It includes most of his recordings on the Savoy and Dial labels, and on Mercury, Clef, Norgran and Verve for Norman Granz, his primary record company relationships, and features some of the finest musicians of the day, including Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Buddy Rich, Milt Jackson, Ray Brown, Erroll Garner, Barney Kessel, Bud Powell, John Lewis, Hank Jones, Art Blakey, Sarah Vaughan, Sonny Rollins, Percy Heath, Charles Mingus and more. It does not purport to be a complete or definitive anthology, but it certainly represents about as comprehensive and representative cross-section of his work as can be accommodated in this set.