Charlie Parker's two-year affiliation with Dial Records captured the triumphs and struggles of his life (1920-1955) in summary. Bird flies West, is grounded, damaged, healed and then returns to the nest: hostility, tragedy, ultimate vindication. The musical results of this odyssey, six albums of originally issued performances and alternate takes, form one of the supreme bodies of recorded work in jazz history. Now, thirty-two years after Bird's sojourn West, this music has been made available by Warner Bros.

Charlie Parker's first session for Dial owner - producer Ross Russell's label was in March 1946, a few months after Bird arrived in Los Angeles from New York. Despite all the radical ideas about rhythm, harmony and sonority in his alto solos here (especially "Night in Tunisia," with its boundless virtuosity and mocking wit), Parker never lost his poise and dancing melodiousness (as is apparent on "Moose the Mooche" and "Yardbird Suite"). Even when his lines dart, there's a nonchalance to his beat that transcends the nervous rhythm section. Alternate takes show the vitality of Charlie Parker's imagination, and his debt to Kansas City mentor Lester Young is never clearer than it is in this session. Taken with the Savoy quintet that produced "Now's the Time" and "Ko-Ko" a few months before, these performances find the twenty-five-year-old Parker at a creative peak similar to Louis Armstrong's exactly two decades earlier.

But L.A. audiences resisted the new music, and Parker's drug problems were getting out of control. In July, a quintet session turned disjointed and incoherent; "Lover Man (Oh, Where Can You Be)," which the saxophonist did not want issued, is painful to hear after the previous high points. After the date, Bird started a fire in his hotel room and ended up in Camarillo state hospital for six months.

When Parker got out of Camarillo in February 1947, he planned to return to the friendly confines of 52nd Street immediately, but Russell worked in a couple of quick studio sessions before Bird's departure. The first, with a rhythm trio led by pianist Erroll Garner, spent most of its time on two vocals by Earl Coleman (a be-bop survivor who's just begun recording again). Of these, the several versions of "Dark Shadows" are most convincing, thanks to Parker's supremacy as a blues player. The instrumental cuts are based on his favorite sources: the chords of "I Got Rhythm" and the blues—"Bird's Nest" and "Cool Blues (Hot Blues)," respectively. Erroll Garner hears music more rigidly, but he remains true to his own unique perspective and never deters the fluent Bird.

The following week, Parker fronted a septet more hooked into his personality, but, as with the sidemen on the "Night in Tunisia" date, the playing of the others gets swallowed up by the leader. Bird's mastery of the blues is awesome on "Carvin' the Bird" and "Relaxin' at Camarillo," the latter of which drummer Kenny Clarke cited as "proving that he [Parker] knows more about the blues than any living musician." There are also performance tapes ("Home Cooking I, II, III") from an L.A. club. These are different sets of familiar changes that Bird explores with just a rhythm section; "Home Cooking II," like so many of his solos on "Cherokee" chords, summarizes much of his personal phraseology.

Before Ross Russell could move to New York, Charlie Parker had reestablished his affiliation with Miles Davis and Max Roach and recorded a couple of quintet sessions for Savoy. It was left for Russell, however, to make the first tapes of Parker's working band, with trumpeter Davis, drummer Roach, pianist Duke Jordan and bassist Tommy Potter. The twenty-two titles recorded by these musicians between October and December 1947, mostly for Dial, mark the apex of Parker's meteoric career. Other giants like Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell and Charles Mingus made great music with Bird, but this band was the most balanced. Davis and Jordan leavened Parker's more impassioned playing with economical, intimate approaches, while Roach's active, polyrhythmic drumming made the biggest difference.

On the band's first session, Parker sails through "The Hymn" and a playful "Dexterity," thrives on the medium tempo of "Bongo Bop" and "Dewey Square," then closes with two masterpieces of sustained development, "Bird of Paradise" and "Embraceable You." His endless recasting of a six-note idea on take one of "Embraceable You" isn't an isolated example of his ingenuity, as the second take of "Bird of Paradise" confirms. Good as they are, Davis and Jordan repeat basic ideas from take to take, while Parker just pours out more original music.

The second session, held one week later, gets even deeper into a ballad mood after the bluesy assurance of "Bird Feathers," the abrupt accents and rushing lines on "Klact-oveeseds-tene" and the mellow scrappling of "Scrapple from the Apple." The ballad trilogy of "My Old Flame," "Don't Blame Me" and especially "Out of Nowhere" is an outpouring of pure soul and a treasury of ideas that formed the vocabulary of future jazz generations.

After such heights, the December recordings, with trombonist J.J. Johnson added to make the band a sextet, are an anticlimax. Still, Johnson's absorption of Parker's conception recalls that Bird's style was now the inspirational beacon for all instrumentalists. "Charlie's Wig" suggests that be-bop was becoming a very "in" code, with clever convolutions in the melodies and hip wordplay in the titles (the melody being Parker's "head" on the chord changes of "When I Grow Too Old to Dream"). Yet there is nothing exclusionary about the joy and excitement of either the various "Crazeology" takes or of a second and different blues called "Bongo Bop" that Steely Dan borrowed for the coda on its "Parker's Band."

Warner brothers had six artists paint pictures about the aforementioned music. All of the paintings and all of the music are available in a six-album boxed set. Only 4000 copies were pressed for the international market—1200 reserved for America—with each set numbered in the lower-left-hand corner (I got 1058/4000). The price ($34.95) is probably beyond many listeners' means.

Those fortunate enough to acquire this sumptuous package will find the same sequencing of complete sessions that British Parkerite Tony Williams put together for his Spotlite label and released on individual LPs (available in many good jazz record stores). For the mass market, Warners has extracted a two-volume summary, The Very Best of Bird, which, unlike Arista's comparable Bird/The Savoy Recordings (Master Takes), is filled with production lapses.

While a twofer containing the classic versions of "Yardbird Suite," "Night in Tunisia," "Embraceable You," "My Old Flame" and others can't help but receive the highest recommendation, it's hardly the definitive sampling of Parker's Dial output. Unless you hear the six-record set, you'll miss the wonderful ease of the second "Moose the Mooche," the way Bird turns the time around in the middle of his last "Ornithology" solo, the heat of the second "Cool Blues," the thematic mastery of the second "Bird of Paradise" or the "Klact-oveeseds-tene" Ross Russell describes in the liner notes. You won't hear "Lover Man," "Dark Shadows," "Crazeology" or the sextet "Bongo Bop" at all. Neither The Very Best of Bird nor Charlie Parker indicates which takes are the originally issued masters, and while there's space to credit three Warner Bros. executives, nothing is said about the original or remastering engineers.

Don't get me wrong, six original paintings in a numbered box is a beautiful thing to have, especially when the music is so essential. But the limited-series elitism is pointless, and the first order of business—reasonably priced, fully annotated sets of this material—hasn't been attended to. All six of the painters (Ben Schonzeit, Raymond Saunders, Larry Rivers, William T. Wiley, Lowell Nesbitt, Romare Bearden) contribute powerful work, but their art remains secondary to the presence created by Charlie Parker's sounds, which command our attention like a photographer asking us to watch the Bird. (RS 269)

BOB BLUMENTHAL