When someone is making a documentary, everybody benefits, because the filmmakers can get access to the “vaults,” and they often uncover previously unknown film and TV footage. That is how the world became aware of Bird’s earliest appearance on film (rather than TV). I have a lot of information on this, including outtakes. This will require several posts, since Substack at the moment only allows one video per post—so let’s get started.
The Bird and Diz TV clip, which we’ll get to of course, was the first Parker footage ever to be discovered. Later, in 1980, a little more footage surfaced in the documentary Joe Albany: A Jazz Life, produced and directed by Carole Langer. In the excerpt above, while pianist Albany talks about his experiences playing with Parker (a radio broadcast of them together exists from 1946), we see two clips of Bird. In the next post I’ll show more and explain where this came from.
Every Film Clip of Charlie Parker, 3; 1950 footage