BOP! The Bird Years: From The Beginning To Charlie Parker’s Death

Calling all ornithologists. These’re for you. They celebrate WHRB celebrating Bebop and Charlie Parker. They were printed at the Bow & Arrow Press, the student print shop recently kicked out of the basement of Adams House in Harvard Square. They came to use from someone who lived in Cambridge between 1971 and 1981. We’ve no idea when these were printed, but the Bow & Arrow opened in 1978, so we’d guess sometime between opening day and when the last moving truck took the former owner’s stuff away in ’81. Like most student printing, it is awful. Too much ink. Weird capitalization. An unnecessary reference to sex. A numerical descriptor separated by an unrelated word that made us google what 127 had to do with Bebop before we noticed the word HOURS one word away. That’s too early for a reference to the 2010 movie by Danny Boyle with the same name. Still an interesting and jazzy pair that are not exactly the same. Aside from the difference in inking and a bite out of the corner of one, there is a compositional difference between the two. Have fun finding it. Listen to this while you do it.