Original Voice Of America Recording Of The 24 December 1949 Carnegie Hall Broadcast. Parker, Charlie.

Extremely scarce Voice of America radio transcription of the 24 December 1949 Carnegie Hall concert that featured "Charlie Parker and his All-Stars" (Red Rodney, Al Haig, Tommy Potter, Roy Haynes), the group playing three bop standards, "Ornithology", "Cheryl", and "Koko". Bird scholar Lawrence Koch describes it as comprising "some of Parker's best work" and is "well recorded for a live recording of this period". Parker really is on scintillating form on these three cuts; maybe the festive season helped, maybe the fact that Birdland, the jazz club on Broadway, had recently been named in his honour. Whatever the reason "Bird is eloquent," says Koch, "his technique is flowing and his tone is round and full. His ideas, moreover, are fresh, and the long lines hold the listener hypnotized. Rodney also comes on beautifully. This group of tunes is a good collection of classic Parker". The broadcast, including "Bird of Paradise" and "Now's the Time", was later released on CD (Jass J-CD 16). The B side features the Lennie Tristano Sextet (Lee Konitz, Warne Marsh, Billy Bauer, Al Shulman, Jeff Martin) on a dreamlike and rather beautiful version of "You Go To My Head", with Konitz's veiled tone to the fore, and the uptempo "Sax of a Kind", which sees the altoist and the deliciously oblique Marsh negotiate the changes with fleet angularity. The government-funded Voice of America, established in 1942 as "America's official international broadcasting organization" - or, to others, a propaganda tool - "attempted to offer a full range of American music. The best-known VOA effort, clearly, has centered on jazz. It became celebrated in much of the twentieth century as the 'music of freedom'" (Heil, p. 289). At this time broadcasts were disseminated via overseas affiliates through these 16-inch transcriptions, which were not intended for distribution in the United States. Their rather unwieldy size and fragility would have meant that few could have survived and, inevitably, they are seldom encountered on the open market. Alan L. Heil, Jr., Voice of America: A History, 2003; Lawrence O. Koch, Yardbird Suite: A Compendium of the Music and Life of Charlie Parker, 1999. 16-inch acetate disc (J-6Three vOA-746 / J-65 VOA-805; matrix numbers on runouts read VOA 746 D-84795 and VOA 805 D-84812), original labels and Radio Disc sleeve. A few minor abrasions to disc, a little wear to sleeve but overall in excellent condition. Columbia's "for promotion only" gold stamp at head of back cover.