Nobody, ever, played the blues like Charlie Parker. A few sang the blues with as much conviction—Bessie Smith, Tommy and Robert Johnson, the early Muddy Waters—but nobody else even approached Parker's uncanny ability to squeeze it out of a saxophone. His gift had a lot to do with dedication and determination, but there was also something inexplicably miraculous about it. One story has the young Parker riding the rails from Kansas City, showing up at a jam session disheveled and dirty as a hobo, borrowing someone's secondhand saxophone and making the most profoundly moving music anyone present had ever heard. Later, a panicky Parker would hock his horn, borrow a beat-up alto that was held together with rubber bands and chewing gum, and make it sound like a brand new Selmer.

Parker didn't just "sing" the blues, he preached them with the fervor of an evangelist; only in the world of born-again churches, healing services and holy dances are there adequate analogues for his particular kind of power. The great bluesmen and blueswomen had the power. They were priests of a black folk-religion, and many of them became actual preachers in the Sanctified Church when the blues life began to lose its charm. Who knows what Parker would have become? Would he have taken to wearing African robes and played cosmic music alongside John Coltrane? Would he have collaborated with Bartók, written movie scores, moved to Copenhagen, joined the Church of God in Christ? If he were alive right now he would be just 55 years old.

We'll never know what Parker might have become but now we can immerse ourselves in what he was, thanks to Herman Lubinsky, Steve Backer and Bob Porter. Lubinsky founded and operated Savoy Records, a scrappy, Newark-based independent label which, before it began concentrating on gospel music, recorded Parker in his prime and preserved other important jazz of the Forties, Fifties and Sixties. Backer was instrumental in Arista Records' acquisition of the Savoy catalog and is serving as executive producer of the Arista/Savoy reissue program. Porter put together the first batch of releases, including Bird/The Savoy Recordings (Master Takes), a two-record set which is the definitive Parker collection on LP.

Bird consists of the released takes of every number Parker recorded for Savoy, including most of his certified masterpieces. Should we call it the one essential jazz album? The most important collection of American music in print? The most rewarding musical compendium in the world? Let's be more modest and call it the last word on the blues. Already, almost everything has been said about how Parker rewrote the rules of melody, harmony and rhythm, about the implacable logic and unquenchable fire of his improvisations, about how desperately he lived and how soon he died. But there isn't really much to say about his blues, because his blues transcend language. To borrow a phrase from Robert Johnson, a Parker soulmate if ever there was one, his blues walk like a man.

The blues on Bird/The Savoy Recordings are a diverse lot. "Now's the Time" was later redone as a rhythm & blues number called "The Hucklebuck," and its melody has become one of the most basic blues clichés. "Billie's Bounce" has been done up at countless jam sessions, but here it is somber, almost a dirge. "Parker's Mood" is a distillation of every blues Parker ever played, a hard, beveled jewel of a blues that shines with an almost unendurable luminescence. "Another Hair-Do" compresses Kansas City swing riffs, boogie-woogie rhythms, vocal inflections and almost everything else you ever wanted to know about the blues into two perfectly sculpted, remarkably sustained choruses. In "Ko Ko," which is based on "Cherokee" but becomes a kind of blues in Parker's hands, the saxophonist plays a solo of such incredible speed and awesome inevitability that time slows to a standstill and one hangs not just on every note but on the components of every note, on the details of attack, timbre, vibrato and decay.

Charlie Parker/The Verve Years (1948-1950) begins where the Savoy set ends, but it has several strikes against it. First, it chronicles Parker's later work, when the turmoil of his life was beginning to interfere with his music. Second, the original recordings were produced by young Norman Granz, who managed to combine Parker with some woefully inadequate and/or incompatible musicians (the Savoy recordings were done with Parker's working groups). But these are Parker recordings. The best of them are seven numbers from the saxophonist's 1950 reunion with Dizzie Gillespie and Thelonious Monk and the one transcendent moment from the first "Parker with Strings" session, the incomparable "Just Friends." These sides, and the album's comprehensive notes (by Chris Albertson), more than justify the purchase price.

In fact, "twofer" reissues in general—"twofer" means you get two discs for a little more than the price of one—are the outstanding record bargains of the past few years. The Fantasy/Prestige/Milestone combine pioneered the twofer concept at the beginning of 1972, and there are now 124 such sets in its catalog. The latest of these include historic performances by saxophonists Gene Ammons (The Gene Ammons Story: The 78 Era, Prestige P-24058), Wardell Gray (Central Avenue, P-24062), John Coltrane (Kenny Burrell/John Coltrane, P-24059) and Oliver Nelson (Images, Featuring Eric Dolphy, P-24060). The first batch of Verve twofers includes a must for pianists, The Genius of Bud Powell (VE-2-2506), which reveals the late master as an influential source for every important keyboard artist, up to and including Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett. Almost as astonishing as the Powell recordings, and until their recent reissue considerably rarer, are the Blue Note dates by the late piano virtuoso Herbie Nichols (collected as The Third World, Blue Note BN-LA-485-H2). All these twofer sets come with essays by knowledgeable critics and, in some cases, by musicians. In every case, efforts have been made to clean up the sound quality of original recordings and to provide complete discographical data. Twofers treat jazz as an American art form, which it was and is. But as worth-while as many and perhaps most of them are, there has never been a twofer like Bird/The Savoy Recordings (Master Takes), nor is there likely to be another. (RS 221)

ROBERT PALMER