We’re having a heat wave, a tropical heat wave this week, which has me feeling like a lazy lima bean. So, I decided to use a Telegraph article about Verve Record LP covers as the basis for this week’s  post. Verve was, of course, the legendary Jazz label founded by Norman Granz. He brought Jazz into the mainstream of American music. He even tried mainstreaming the Bird with mixed results.

Here’s how the Telegraph article described Charlie Parker with Strings:

Charlie Parker with Strings was a 1950 Verve Records album with artwork by David Stone Martin (1913–1992). Martin, who drew using a crowquill pen, illustrated more than 400 albums and his work is represented in the Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian Institution. On this album Parker worked with a Small classical string section (as well as a jazz rhythm section) and recorded songs by Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart and George and Ira Gershwin. The album was admitted to the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1988.

Here’s the cover:

More Birding after the break.

An expanded version of the album was re-released on CD in 1995 with an alternate but equally swell cover:

Here’s the 1995 reissue in the playlist format.