The Quartet of Charlie Parker - Now's The Time (1973 Japanese Verve Mono LP)

Vinyl: EX
Sleeve: VG+
Obi: VG+

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The Quartet of Charlie Parker - Now's The Time | Vinyl LP - 1973 Japanese Verve / Polydor Mono Reissue (MV 2029, The Genius of Charlie Parker Series #3)

Charlie Parker's last studio years on Verve have been periodically dismissed as commercial. Too many strings, too many big bands, too much Norman Granz trying to package the most important alto saxophonist of the century into formats Verve could sell. The 1952 and 1953 quartet sessions on this LP are the answer to that argument. With just a piano, bass and drums for company, Parker is exposed in the way the bebop trios and quartets of a decade earlier had exposed him, and the playing across these two dates ranks with the best studio work of his career. The 30 December 1952 session opens Side A with Hank Jones at the piano, Teddy Kotick on bass and Max Roach back behind the kit. Roach had been Parker's drummer on and off since the 1945 Savoy sessions; the partnership is documented across most of the records that matter. "Laird Baird" was named for Parker's son Baird, "Kim" for his stepdaughter, "Cosmic Rays" for nobody in particular. Side B convenes a new quartet in July 1953, Al Haig in for Jones, Percy Heath in for Kotick, Roach holding his chair, and turns in the title track ("Now's the Time" was originally a Savoy recording from 1945, here remade with the 1953 quartet), "Confirmation", a tender "I Remember You", and three takes of "Chi Chi".

The album sat in Verve's catalogue across the late 1950s and 1960s as the third volume of The Genius of Charlie Parker series Granz had assembled to organise the alto saxophonist's posthumous discography. Polydor Japan picked up the licence in the 1970s and issued this 1973 pressing as MV 2029, keeping the original "Genius #3" series numbering and the 12" Verve sequencing with all the alternate takes included. The recording quality was already exceptional by the standards of Bird's earlier Dial and Savoy sides; the Japanese pressing brings it through cleanly.