Humanity's been making art for a long time now. And for just about as long, it's been talking about art. And rediscovering old art: it's often tempting to think that we live in a golden age of awareness of what went before us; but remember the various rediscoveries of ancient Greek culture that have taken place over the centuries in Europe.

We like to be told about art almost as much as we like to experience it ourselves - more, perhaps: who among us hasn't looked up reviews of favourite albums or books or films or what-have-you, to see what the experts say? After all, there's nothing more enjoyable than having your views validated - except, perhaps, the joy of scoffing at a critic who "just doesn't get it."

I have an uneasy relationship with art criticism. Not because I don't value the work of critics, far from it - I have a few hypocrisies, but that's not one of them. Rather, it seems that time and again I've been disappointed by a supposed masterpiece. Especially films: I've watched Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries twice, once with a sense of excitement and once with bafflement and an insistence that there must be something I'm missing; maybe there is, but either way the film just doesn't do anything for me. (I'm greatly relieved to be able to inform you all that I found the same director's Scenes From a Marriage absolutely enthralling - perhaps there's hope for me yet!) There are some "great" albums that just don't do anything for me, either: most notably Kind of Blue, which is pleasant enough but to my ear just doesn't have the vitality of Miles Davis's quintet recordings from just a few years earlier. But despite many such disappointments (or failings, depending on how you view the matter) I keep seeking out the acknowledged masterpieces. After all, everyone agrees how great they are: who am I to say otherwise?

So it was with great excitement that I found a copy of Charlie Parker's fabled Dial sessions in a record shop in Guildford, Surrey, when I was living in England in 2003. At that stage I was deep into my jazz-listening years and I had a collector's zealotry: I had my trusty copy of the Penguin Guide to Jazz on C.D. (wonderful book, by the way: pick it up if you have an interest) and I knew exactly which recordings were top of the must-haves. And Charlie Parker's Dial and Savoy recordings were top of the top; not least because they were so strangely hard to find. (I wasn't to know that only a few years later, reissues of them would be overflowing from record store shelves: out of copyright, you see.) I'd looked for them in every store I went to in Australia, to no avail. I did this for what seemed like years. (I have a strange attitude when it comes to ordering C.D.s from overseas, but you don't want to know about that.) When I went to England I started the process over there, too - in fact I even had a list drawn up of hard-to-find jazz titles that I desperately wanted. Imagine my surprise and delight when I finally found the Dial recordings in Guildford, of all places! (And even more amazingly, for only 20 pounds for the full 4-C.D. set. I've always had an eye for a bargain, as my mother can attest.)

Now, at this stage I had little reason to believe that I would like Charlie Parker. I don't think I'd even heard a complete performance of his: only snatches of solos, designed to showcase his brilliance. They sounded like nothing so much as noise to me. Expertly played noise, to be sure, but still more noise than music. I already knew that the more extreme outreaches of jazz weren't my cup of tea: most of all I like melody, something you can hum. Always have. But still - I had to have the classic Charlie Parker recordings. Every critic I read or heard said that he was one of the greats, that his music was some of the greatest of the 20th century. How could I have a self-respecting jazz collection without the recordings? So I had no hesitation in buying the Dial C.D.s. (Well, some hesitation, but that was purely financial. Sure, it was a great price, but I didn't have a job.)

I have to say, it wasn't promising at the start. The first two discs in the set had some moments, but they were patchy at best, and a lot of the best music seemed to be obscured behind diabolically bad recordings. The liner notes were informative but a little apologetic: explaining the woes that Parker was experiencing at this or that recording session (or, as often as not, inflicting upon his fellow musicians and his recording engineers). I was glad I had the music, because I'm a bit of a completist and it was important to me to have the Parker recordings for their place in the jazz canon, but . . . I wasn't enjoying them very much. There's nothing quite so demoralising (or, depending on your mood and your bullishness, self-satisfying) as not "getting" supposedly great art.

Still, I had two whole C.D.s to go (this was, after all, the "complete" Dial recordings: out-takes, alternate takes and all. The masters fit snugly onto two C.D.s.) The first two C.D.s in the set were the west coast sessions: performances recorded far away from Parker's adopted home base in New York. The second two C.D.s, though, were the east coast sessions. Maybe I'd enjoy these more?

Did I ever. I won't go into detail here, it'd be tedious, but suffice to say that the third and fourth discs of the complete Dial recordings are two of my most played jazz discs (well, the masters anyway. I can live without the alternate takes - I'm just not an alternate takes kinda guy). I discovered two important things about Parker that nobody had told me previously. The first thing I learned was that more than any other jazz musician before him a Charlie Parker recording was a complete performance. You can listen to all the snippets you want, all the excised solos you can get your hands on, but unless you're a musician you probably won't get a lot out of them. Or at least, you won't get the full story. To truly appreciate Charlie Parker's music you need to listen to the whole performance, from first note to last, even the bits where Parker isn't playing. All the parts form a seamless whole with an inexorably logical and beautiful flow that's interrupted, shattered, distorted, if you just listen to eight bars of Bird soloing. A piece of music by Charlie Parker is like a piece of music by Bach in that respect: it develops and resolves itself in a way that makes perfect sense, that nobody else could have pulled off.

The second important lesson I learned about Charlie Parker is the ballads. Oh, the ballads. Much of the fourth and final disc of the Dial collection is made up of ballad performances. After listening to it many times I believe that one of the greatest revolutions - and perhaps one of the least pursued - that Charlie Parker unleashed upon jazz was his approach to playing a ballad. For a comparison, listen first to the great Ben Webster tackling, say, "In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning". Webster, one of the masterful generation of tenor saxophonists thrown out by the swing era, is the acknowledged master of the jazz ballad. It's easy to understand why as soon as you put on one of his albums, or an album (or, bearing in mind earlier discussions in these pages, a pre-album compilation) on which he appears. To quote Richard Cook and Brian Morton from the Penguin guide, "[the song] 'Tenderly' has never been so tender". (By the way, if you want a simply great jazz album that won't do anything more complicated than just give you sumptuous and swinging music for 35 minutes or so, get Ben Webster meets Oscar Peterson.) Webster's approach to the ballad is the classic approach, sculpted to perfection: slow, introspective, alternately heartbroken and joyous, depths-of-night reflective and first-light celebratory.

Charlie Parker's approach could hardly be more different. If Ben Webster is the voice of a great lover, Charlie Parker is a lover who can't quite explain how he feels. Oh, he has a lot of words, but he can't quite form them into a coherent sentence: they come spilling out of him at a million miles an hour, all out of kilter, all higgledy piggledy. It's like listening to a shy man desperately trying to explain to a woman exactly how much he loves her. It's the polar opposite to Webster's balladry, and yet it is in its own way as infinitely moving and as wise about human experience as the tenor man's music.

I'm sure not everyone will get Charlie Parker the way I get Charlie Parker. I'm sure the way I get Charlie Parker isn't the officially sanctioned way to "get" Charlie Parker. For all this talk of canonisation, different people like different things. Wild Strawberries doesn't speak to me, but it obviously shouts all the wisdom in the world to a great many people. I used to be disappointed whenever I couldn't appreciate something that I knew was supposed to be great. I don't any more. I don't think the change of heart came when I started to "get" Charlie Parker's music, but it didn't hurt. Maybe it was the first step. But the way I feel now is: there's going to be a lot of stuff in the world that any one of us won't like; but when we find something we do like, when we find something we love, that we want to shout to the whole world about, then that makes the searching and the sampling and the disappointments all worth the effort.