Hot on the heels of last month’s American Jazz Classics CD of virtually the same material comes this reissue of early 1950s 10-inch LPs, titled Be-Bop by Charlie Parker on the labels but New Sounds In Modern Music Vols.1-4 on the sleeves.

Before going into detail, it’s important to underline that the Savoy music remains amazing and, although representing only part of Bird’s early output, it includes masterpieces not paralleled on any other label. All the tracks here contain valuable playing lessons and stunning listening experiences, with ‘Parker’s Mood’ showing him at his most direct and ‘relatable’, as they say, and ‘KoKo’ his most abstract and radical. Of course, early 1950s attitudes to programming mean that material deriving from eight different Savoy dates is completely jumbled up – the idea of grouping the output of whole sessions together chronologically only came in during the late 1950s – so the listener is refreshingly forced to evaluate tracks individually, rather like absorbing the then-recent 78rpm singles.

The remastering is fine but not superior to CDs of the 1990s, a reminder that the original engineering was impressively faithful – you could spend an instructive hour-plus just listening to what Max Roach does on all but three tracks, two of the exceptions being from Tiny Grimes’s 1944 session. The essay by Neil Tesser is excellent, putting Bird in the context of his times and his continued relevance, with new comments from Makaya McCraven and Chris Potter. (Tesser is not infallible, though; the 68-bar chorus of themeless improv called ‘Klaunstance’ is based not on ‘All The Things You Are’ but on ‘The Way You Look Tonight’.) It’s worth noting the inclusion of ‘Warming Up A Riff’, Savoy’s earliest ‘out-take’ from the ‘KoKo’ session, which was also issued concurrently on 78 and 45rpm. But the surprise is the presence of ‘Confirmation’ from Gillespie’s 1947 concert, since released on the Roost CD Diz ’n Bird At Carnegie Hall but originally bootlegged by Savoy producer Teddy Reig.

The suspicion remains that the main appeal of such vinyl reissues is to collectors who feel that, if they were around back in the day, they’d have been hip enough to buy mint copies of these early LPs. Worse still, they may be collectors of physical artefacts rather than audio carriers, in which case one hopes they do actually listen from time to time and realise what an influence this music has had, and continues to have.