Kevin Sun

Off the cuff notes and thoughts on Bird, Part III:
It's hard to say with confidence what the "most ______" of Bird's recorded output is without comprehensively surveying the territory, which is fairly well-defined at this point, but would still require at least 72 hours of time on hand and access to the complete discography. 
I believe I've heard most of the publicly available recordings, although there are still a number of recordings that I haven't been able to get a hold of—most notably tunes from a spring 1951 performance supposedly in Boston, as well as a quartet performance as part of Jazz at the Philharmonic from November 1948. What surprised me most wasn't any single holy grail-type recording, but instead the consistency of the entire body of work, which is almost unerringly excellent and many times great.

Off the cuff notes and thoughts on Bird, Part II:One rewarding diversion for me during the quarantine has been comparing the trove of alternate takes of Bird on Dial, Savoy, and Verve (Mercury). Rather than just listening to the takes in sequence or alternating back and forth, I took a page from Phil Schaap's book and tried to listen to some of the takes at the same time to see how similar or different Bird's solo arcs would be.

Off the cuff notes and thoughts on Bird, Part I:In the process of trying to compile most of Charlie Parker's recorded output, I determined that there are about three full days of known recordings (over 70 hours), of which about one full day (24 hours) is made up of his solo improvisations. The cult status that Bird achieved and became mythologized into is reflected by the vast amount of bootleg recordings that surfaced after his death, which now vastly outstrips by volume the studio documents released during his lifetime.

Here are a few of the rarest documents of Charlie Parker playing his own blues compositions that I came across while assembling my own near-comprehensive library of recorded Bird:

Of the tunes that Bird played live but never recorded in the studio, Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer's "This Time the Dream's On Me" is notable in that Bird had prepared a quintet arrangement and was documented playing it in both quartet and quintet formats over the years. Dean Benedetti recorded at least three (possibly four) live versions of Bird playing the tune at the Onyx in July 1948, where he sounds rather tentative compared to the live recordings from 1950 through 1953.