Help to identify a piece

That video has short snippets of lots of songs, are you referring to the ballad that is playing for a few seconds when you click on your link?

I don't know the song, but it sounds like its from his very early years when he was playing in Charlie Parker's band. That would cover a couple albums on the Dial label. These days most of those songs are available on Parker/Dial compilations.

I put the song on our home page.

If the song gets bumped from the front page, you will be able to hear it on the Charlie Parker page.

That track is from Bird's last recording session for Dial, on December 17, 1947. The lineup is Bird's quintet of the time, with J.J. Johnson added on trombone. The others, apart from Bird of course, are Miles Davis (tp), Duke Jordan (p), Tommy Potter (b) and Max Roach (d).

It is the only item from that session on which J.J. plays open trombone. I don't care for the sound of the mute that he used on the other five pieces. There are two surviving takes of "How Deep Is The Ocean", and it seems that there were no other takes. As usual with Parker's Dial recordings, it is hard to see why any of the takes were rejected. They are all good. Parker being such a brilliant improviser, it is great that we get to hear a lot of alternate takes, because the solos are always different.

Dial owner, Ross Russell, sold the masters to another company which didn't look after them, and they were all lost. All of the reissues of this priceless material are taken from Dial 78s and LPs, which is why several of them have quite a bit of surface noise. Starting in the late 50s, the Dial recordings were reissued in a disorganized manner by various budget labels. They were, basically, pirate issues. In the mid 60s, when I first got into Parker, the search for this material was very frustrating. Then, a guy in England called Tony Williams (not Miles's drummer) decided that it was time to reissue all the Dial tracks that still existed, in an organized and comprehensive manner. He got in touch with Russell, to make the definitive reissue official. Tony was able to put out just about everything that was recorded, on six LPs. Good copies of nearly all the tracks were used, and Ross wrote the album notes for the LPs, which added to the authenticity of the project; he also provided Tony with a test pressing of one track that had never been issued before.

I vividly remember my excitement at these reissues. Volumes 1 through 5 came out first, and I had to wait a while for the final volume to appear. All six LPs were hungrily devoured.

This was long before Michael Cuscuna's reissue work and all of today's "The Complete Recordings of Wotsisname for the Soandso Label" sets.

Since Tony's wonderful reissue work, these Dial recordings have appeared on other labels, and they are pretty much pirate editions, though the recordings are more or less public domain now, especially in the U.K. and Europe, where anything over 50 years old is up for grabs.