Charlie Parker - Live Performances Volume I - (1982 Italian Base Record Vinyl LP)

Vinyl: VG+
Sleeve: VG+
Obi: None

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Charlie Parker - Live Performances Volume I | Vinyl LP - Italian Base Record Pressing (ESP-Bird-1, c. 1982 licensed from ESP-Disk's 1972 original)

The radio broadcasts that document Charlie Parker's late-1940s working life have always been the most contested part of his legacy: never authorised, never commercially released in his lifetime, and traded among collectors for decades before any label tried to issue them properly. The 20 September 1947 Mutual broadcast that opens Side A is one of the strangest. The network had been running a series of pitched battles between the trad-jazz old guard and the bebop modernists, and once the boppers had won their week they came back to do a closing medley as the "Barry Ulanov All-Star Metronome Jazzmen". The lineup pulled together Parker and Gillespie from one school, Lennie Tristano and his clarinettist John La Porta and guitarist Billy Bauer from another, and Ray Brown and Max Roach in the rhythm section. The two camps barely overlapped on record before or after. The Royal Roost material that fills the rest of the LP comes from Symphony Sid Torin's WMCA broadcasts, picking up the Parker Quintet on two consecutive Saturdays in December 1948: 11 December with Miles Davis still in the band, then 25 December with Kenny Dorham newly arrived to replace him.

Bernard Stollman's ESP-Disk label assembled the Comprehensive Charlie Parker series in 1972 as the first sustained attempt to organise the broadcast catalogue. ESP-BIRD-1 was the opening volume. The Italian Base Record pressing followed roughly a decade later under the same catalogue number, drawing on the same sources and the same sequencing. Material of this kind has always existed in jazz's grey-area collector market, and the Base Record pressings are part of that lineage, issued, distributed and shelved alongside the official Parker reissues without ever being officially licensed from the original broadcasters or the artists' estates. Sound quality is what radio aircheck recordings of 1947 and 1948 sound like: documentary rather than audiophile. This is the Italian Base Record pressing, ESP-Bird-1, almost certainly from 1982.