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Lester Young/Basie Set Selling Well


tranemonk

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I got my Basie 1941-51 10LP box today... so I've got all the Columbia (Vocalion/OKeh) Basie I need.

The Mosaic set is very good, it has a different focus and maybe better sound than the vinyl (I've not tried to compare)... and it's of course mainly a Pres set with Basie providing the frame. Would have been even better if it had been a Pres set along the lines of the Chu Berry set, also including the Billie Holiday and Teddy Wilson (roughly 3CD?) material for the same label(s). But I love it as it is, and it's certainly more of a homogenic package as it is now.

One more thought: ever since they started the Selects, smaller boxes have gotten fewer and far between... does this comparatively fast sale of the Pres/Basie suggest there's more of a market for smaller and hence cheaper boxes? I love the old 3CD and 4CD boxes... with Fuller, McLean, Rivers, Mitchell etc. etc. there have been plenty. If it's got to be five CDs to make it feasible with all the costs to produce the entire packaging, that's fine, too. Those have also gotten scarce (Turrentine, Hampton, Quincy, Hackett, Pass are the recent ones, though the Hackett's from 2001 - and I still don't have it...)

Not suggesting they should first decide on size and then find what they can fit in - that would be completely wrong. But I'm sure there's plenty of options in that range, too!

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One more thought: ever since they started the Selects, smaller boxes have gotten fewer and far between... does this comparatively fast sale of the Pres/Basie suggest there's more of a market for smaller and hence cheaper boxes? I love the old 3CD and 4CD boxes... with Fuller, McLean, Rivers, Mitchell etc. etc. there have been plenty. If it's got to be five CDs to make it feasible with all the costs to produce the entire packaging, that's fine, too. Those have also gotten scarce (Turrentine, Hampton, Quincy, Hackett, Pass are the recent ones, though the Hackett's from 2001 - and I still don't have it...)

Not suggesting they should first decide on size and then find what they can fit in - that would be completely wrong. But I'm sure there's plenty of options in that range, too!

That this sold so well and fast may not have anything to do with size, but maybe with the allure of Pres. I often think there's a market section that Mosaic has for the older styles of jazz that may exist outside the internet, that is there may be a sizable number of buyers that we never see on the boards, but get the catalogs and order. They may have been waiting for just such a set and hopped right on it.

Anyway, I'm so glad that this set was a success. It's a well-deserved success.

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One more thought: ever since they started the Selects, smaller boxes have gotten fewer and far between... does this comparatively fast sale of the Pres/Basie suggest there's more of a market for smaller and hence cheaper boxes? I love the old 3CD and 4CD boxes... with Fuller, McLean, Rivers, Mitchell etc. etc. there have been plenty. If it's got to be five CDs to make it feasible with all the costs to produce the entire packaging, that's fine, too. Those have also gotten scarce (Turrentine, Hampton, Quincy, Hackett, Pass are the recent ones, though the Hackett's from 2001 - and I still don't have it...)

Not suggesting they should first decide on size and then find what they can fit in - that would be completely wrong. But I'm sure there's plenty of options in that range, too!

That this sold so well and fast may not have anything to do with size, but maybe with the allure of Pres. I often think there's a market section that Mosaic has for the older styles of jazz that may exist outside the internet, that is there may be a sizable number of buyers that we never see on the boards, but get the catalogs and order. They may have been waiting for just such a set and hopped right on it.

Anyway, I'm so glad that this set was a success. It's a well-deserved success.

That may well be true indeed!

Some of these "old jazz" Mosaics can occasionally still be found in some weird specialist stores, too... they just buy them for their possibly mostly non-internet-savvy clientele.

Not suggesting they should first decide on size and then find what they can fit in - that would be completely wrong. But I'm sure there's plenty of options in that range, too!

I believe we learned that the target size was 7, in economic terms.

Correct.

Okay, wasn't aware of that... too bad, really! This may sound silly, but someone who started buying Mosaics when the Tristano/Konitz/Marsh (my first) one or the Guiffre were new, six is kind of okay, and seven or more is of course okay as well, but it's just inside my head that beginning with seven, it's a "big" box, needing more talking me into buying it etc. I think the only one bigger than six discs I bought early on was the Basie live (the studio was, alas, already gone).

Guess in those days, five or six discs still made sense, economically... at least that's what the releases in the 160s and 170s suggest (okay, there's the Kenton, the Maynaaaaaard which I missed alas, the Classic Capitol which was back then the largest one around and I did eventually buy it).

Economy changed alright, and Mosaic suffers from that quite some, I assume... and it would likely be suicidal to raise prices. Anyway, again I wasn't aware of the seven discs threshold.

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For me it's because of Pres. I'm a huge Lester Young fan, more a Lester Young fan than a Count Basie Orchestra fan. I had (have) this material on other discs, but the mastering, source material and sound is all over the map and here it's all together in excellent presentation and sounding fantastic. So this is one big hunk of Pres I can grab and spin. If I have this and the Savoy two cd set and the Keynotes, Commodores and the Verve set. . . I'm ready to go to that island.

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Why do people consider this to be one of Mosaic's best sets? Isn't most of this music available elsewhere?

My problem is that I've come to learn that I'm just not a big Count Basie fan. I tried to be, but I'm just not. And that's the way it is. Oh well.

"I ain't got no Basie with lester/i ain't got nothing but the blues" that's why

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For me it's because of Pres. I'm a huge Lester Young fan, more a Lester Young fan than a Count Basie Orchestra fan. I had (have) this material on other discs, but the mastering, source material and sound is all over the map and here it's all together in excellent presentation and sounding fantastic. So this is one big hunk of Pres I can grab and spin. If I have this and the Savoy two cd set and the Keynotes, Commodores and the Verve set. . . I'm ready to go to that island.

Why do people consider this to be one of Mosaic's best sets?

Lester Young changed the world, and this set has a big chunk of the details, that's why.

Pretty much the same here ... hope my set will arrive soon.

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