Review: 'Ornithology: The Best of Bird' by Charlie Parker

As jazz evolved beyond hummable melodies tailored for dance halls and 78s, Charlie "Bird" Parker was right there pushing it into the freewheeling zone that would become known as bebop. Not that he couldn't play the game. Some of Parker's most memorable recordings were fit for juke boxes and barely set a toe past the three-minute demarcation. But what he did within those three minutes was something entirely new, even if he was sticking to simple, well-traveled blues progressions. The melodic riffs that ostensibly hold things like "Ko-Ko", "Donna Lee", and "Anthropology" together are remarkably complex. Without what most sensible folks might describe as tunefulness, Parker's work was pure musicianship and emotion, whether he was going for the joyful spot with "Groovin' High" or playing it dreamy and romantic on "Parker's Mood". 

Charlie Parker was the embodiment of bebop, but because his life was short, he'd have to leave it to coworkers like Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis to run with the genre and develop it further. But he still generated a number of classics during his mere 34 years, easily enough to fill the new single-LP retrospective Ornithology: The Best of Bird. Its eleven tracks showcase how Parker and friends like Davis, Gillespie, Charles Mingus, and Max Roach rearranged the face of music as the disc moves from tidy numbers like "Ko-Ko" and the indelible "Now's the Time" and outward with more expansive performances like "Confirmation" and an epic live rendition of Dizzy's staggeringly jagged "Salt Peanuts". 

Because Ornithology comes by way of Craft Recordings, one of the giants of contemporary jazz reissues, it is both beautifully mastered (by Paul Blakemore) and pressed.