While this new music was developing and flourishing at Minton's Playhouse, its beginnings forever evaded the recording studio. When recording did resume, Parker and Gillespie, along with the genre's other great movers and shakers – luminaries such as Dexter Gordon, Erroll Garner, and Max Roach – started cutting sessions at Savoy Records. Herman Lubinsky, a middle-aged no-nonsense radio repairman, founded Savoy in 1942. Lubinsky managed to get a few records released before the ban, and once it was enacted he recorded musicians under pseudonyms in attempts to sidestep it. One of his A&R men, Teddy Reig, was a regular at many New York City jazz clubs. Hired in early 1945, right after the ban was lifted, Reig befriended up-and-coming artists and brought them into various studios to record for Savoy.
As exhilarating as early bebop performances are, the modern ear is quick to notice sonic shortcomings. Savoy didn't feature the best recording fidelity at the time. This isn't to say they're bad recordings – only that the engineering know-how and older analog equipment in use at a smaller label couldn't compare to the majors. It's regrettable that Charlie Parker never received the fidelity on records that his virtuosity deserved. But in the modern era, another problem compounds the early Savoy sides' sonics – what labels now use as the source material. Music historian Frank Kofsky claimed that Lubinsky, a famous cheapskate, had "a scarcely disguised disdain for black art" (see 1. below) and an unwillingness to understand much of the music his own record label recorded. Like many record companies' masters, unfortunately Savoy's no longer exist. It's not known what happened to the metal parts, only that: One, they were once transferred to tape, and: Two, their owner was a hard line businessman who was shortsighted, indifferent, or perhaps even animus to the revolutionary music that surrounded him.
Because of those factors, today, the sound of these recordings exist in limbo. When the master source is missing, the true fidelity – however good or bad in the first place – is forever obscured, to some degree. The Savoy catalog was purchased by Concord Music Group in 2019. The Savoy disc masters were transferred to tape in the early '50s for the production of five 10-inch compilation LPs covering the label's early history – and CMG's Craft Recordings have recently reissued that very set of LPs. A re-release in the truest sense, Craft maintained their original title (The Birth of Bop) and they even feature jackets with the exact same cover art. As the disc masters can't be located, those disc-to-tape transfers, performed over 70 years ago, have been the sources used for almost every reissue, boxset, or repackaging of Savoy recordings since, including this release. It appears Mosaic Records' Classic Savoy Be-Bop Sessions 1945-49 compilation was sourced from commercial pressings, although per industry standard licensing agreements (and their intention of being limited editions) this mastering unfortunately isn't accessible digitally – such as on streaming services – and is out of print on CD.
