Let us now praise a famous ghost... embracing the spirit of Charlie Bird Parker.

They are like feathers fluttering down from a spirit up above. Bird feathers. I make haste to collect them as the settle around me forming words and music...a complete picture of the epiphany that came to some in an age when few dared to break the established mould. Bird feathers that flutter down in a groove yard. All that's left of a genius at the center of a storm, on an evangelical mission... His music that shook the world out of its stultifying reverie and brought it back to life again. Songs and memories in the key of life... of Charlie "Bird" Parker.

The most telling aspect of this record Bird in Time 1940—1947—Selected Recordings and Rare Interviews (ESP-Disk, 2008) appears in the first few lines of researcher-compiler-producer Michael D. Anderson's notes in Booklet-1. Here he suggests that he feels "obligated" to "dispel the myth" that Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie solely created Modern Jazz or Bebop in the mid-1940s. The radical statement itself begs the observed aside, and a series of rhetorical questions: The capitalized Modern Jazz and Bebop? Proper nouns? And why not? This music in question, this is prototypically referential music that we are talking about and listening to. Moreover it is music that is representative of a unique entity and is used to denote a particular thing without regard to any descriptive meaning the word or phrase may have.

Anderson also states something that few listeners and critics may be willing to accept because it's easier to "accept" and not to "dispel" a myth. That Monk, Bird and Dizzy were the greatest evangelists of Modern Jazz and Bebop is a historical fact. And that is exactly what this record sets out to actually do. To recognize the singular, all-important contribution that Bird has made to Modern Jazz and Bebop—and one could almost certainly say to Modern Music as well—but then the addition of Ellington, Armstrong, Mingus and a few others would also have to be added to the pantheon of "creators" and "evangelists".

The fact is this is not the avowed intention of this remarkable 4-CD set. Rather it is to show the remarkable development of the most important aspect of modern music—perhaps (and here it is also necessary to mention Ira Gitler's emphatic tone, who states in the introduction to The Masters of Bebop—A Listener's Guide (Da Capo Press, 1966 and reprinted in 2001) that Bebop is the only modern development in the (jazz) music of our time). And it is also, lest anyone is apt to jump up in protest, to show through historic interviews and rare music recordings—that have been placed in a thoughtful chronology to dispel and emphasize the importance of Charlie "Bird" Parker in the development of this "Modern Jazz."

So it is appropriate for Anderson to begin his notes with a remarkable genealogy—a sort of Book of Genesis—that music historians so love to write that accurately records the historical ancestors not only of this Bebop music, but also specifically of Bird and the other two members of his triumvirate. This time the term used to describe anyone of any significance who has come excel in the era before Bebop is "Pre-modernists". Some of the best known, are John Kirby, Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Roy Eldridge and Don Byas. They provided—as Anderson suggests—the foundation of Bebop and showcased its finest proponents. And these (proponents in turn) brought the music vibrantly alive. They did so by pulling hard at the elasticity of the music so loved that it twisted and turned into an interminably evolving vortex that, in turn, begat a new dialect in which Monk, Bird and Dizzy sang in the perfect idiom and therefore created the musical environment for "Bebop".

Discs 1, especially, is a showcase for Bird's music, so Monk and Dizzy's music is "deliberately" not represented. But once again, to hear the near-fully formed voice of Bird as early as in 1940 is truly remarkable. Remember that this is even before the Los Angeles recordings of February 1947 especially the triumphant gigs at Hi De Ho, in March, 1947, the late 1947 gig at The Three Deuces and another at The Onyx on 52nd Street in July 1948—The Complete Dean Benedetti Recordings of Charlie Parker (Mosaic, 1990).