Charlie Parker, New York Anthology 1950-1954

He was the Hendrix of jazz, was Charlie Parker. The living genius who flamed out young, so consumed by his music that he could practice 15 hours a day if he wasn’t strung out on junk. He helped forge a new form of jazz—bebop, in this case—and improvised riffs on his saxophone that fellow musicians sometimes could barely comprehend, let alone copy. His skills were elevated to an almost ludicrous level of worship by journeymen sax players, and even now, Bird is the word. This three-disc collection captures him during his last four years—not generally pleasant ones for him. The combination of heroin abuse, exhaustion and hounding by the authorities was ravaging him to such an extent that when he died in 1955, the coroner thought he was 60 when he was only 34. But he could still play like wildfire when the mood took him, and some think his best work lands square in the middle of these years.