crisp

Two preorders for January: Brecker Brothers: Complete Arista Albums Collection: £10.99 at Amazon UK (8 discs) It's Elvis Presley "Elvis - The Movie Soundtracks: £32.01 at Amazon UK (20 discs)

There's a second Living Stereo collection scheduled for February. Amazon UK has it on preorder for £53.99 (60 discs). No idea what's in it.

Forgot to mention Will Friedwald who is unusual in specialising in singers. Very readable and gets everything spot on most of the time.

Yes, it was co-composed by Crombie and Green.

Interesting. Seems to be a new series from Universal including the material they bought from EMI. The Sinatra set mixes both Capitol and Reprise albums for the first time. I wonder if Universal will be able to get the Sinatra family to authorise an upgrade of the Capitol sessions now.

For my sins Benny Green was one of my intros to jazz. He had a very good long-running BBC radio show on the Great American Songbook and latterly a jazz show on Jazz FM. Even at the time I found him a bit prejudiced in his tastes, but he was an engaging broadcaster and could be funny as well. My preference for mainstream jazz and swing stems from his shows I expect. I can see why someone just wanting jazz notes would be annoyed by his writing. He was a man of many interests (cricket, P.G. Wodehouse, stage musicals, George Bernard Shaw...) and would crowbar in references wherever possible. As he was a working-class Londoner with a strong Cockney accent I suspected he felt the need to prove his intelligence against the usual prejudices. BTW he wrote the original notes for Kind of Blue (!) and actually had a tune of his recorded by Miles (!!): So Near, So Far on Seven Steps to Heaven. My favourite liner note writers: Dan Morgenstern, Loren Schoenberg and Bob Blumenthal. I've learnt so much from their lucid, knowledgable writings.

The RCA Albums Collection is £36 at Amazon UK. About £2.10 a disc.

Ah, thanks. That came up in a search I did but I thought it was from the pre-Concord OJC era. I'll add it to the list

Not sure if this has been posted. Vivarte set (60 CDs) for £51.99 at Amazon UK.

Thanks guys!

Which Dexter Gordon set do you mean? I must have missed it.

I got one too. I stopped getting them after moving house last year, although I've ordered a few sets since. I emailed and asked to be put back on the mailing list. Now I'm wondering if Mosaic publishes quarterly catalogues or if it's just this annual one.

Appreciate your sympathy. The previous limit of £18 was mad enough, but then they lowered it! Here I think it's more to do with shutting down the Jersey-based stores that were using the tax loophole to undercut the high street, but the high street is changing anyway. So the Jersey stores have gone but the high street still isn't what it used to be and probably never will be. Oh to live in Australia where the limit is something like AUS$1,000!

Yes, so much for the Tories being the party of low taxes. The irritation with this box is that it's just under the old limit of £18. Ah, well, it's bound to come down elsewhere.

Argh. I've been after a good price on this but that busts the new £15 customs limit in the UK, which means an extra 20% plus an £8 Royal Mail fine. If anyone spots a similar European discount, please let me know!

Hmm, but what if Ace owns more than two jazz labels and starts reissuing them on Boplicity as well? This thread title could get pretty long...

(Although I admit I didn't know about this Dootone thread when I posted it.)

The Columbia Jazz Collection: £33.49 for 25 CDs at Amazon UK.

Ace Records in the UK has started a new jazz reissue label called Boplicity. From the website: Ace Records’ Boplicity label was one of the earliest entries into the jazz reissues market in the mid-1980s. The short release schedule covered classic modern jazz from the 50s and 60s, taking in music originally released by Blue Note, Riverside, Prestige and various smaller independents. We are now re-launching the label as home for our small but distinct catalogue of 1950s and 1960s modern jazz. Featuring bonus tracks wherever possible, each release will strive for the highest quality in sound reproduction, using fresh transfers of the original master tapes. Here's what's available so far: Chet Baker: Cools Out Chet Baker: Quintette Buddy Collette: Buddy's Best Curtis Counce: Exploring the Future Dexter Gordon: Dexter Blows Hot and Cool Chico Hamilton With Paul Horn Coleman Hawkins: The Hawk Swings Introducing Carl Perkins I don't know how Ace came to acquire these masters, although they own the back catalogues of quite a few small labels of that period. Thoughts?

Sure, but my point was that EmArcy is a division of Universal Europe, which has been releasing PD-type sets of material it doesn't own in the Complete Masters series -- example here. I have a few of those sets and they are excellent, fwiw, among the few PD sets that I would buy (Vocalion's are the other).

I'm wondering if this is one of those Universal Europe pseudo-PD boxes, like the Complete Masters sets they did. The presence of both Sony and Universal material is odd.

Now £98.96 at Amazon UK.

I didn't hear about Mosaic until we first got the internet at work. I recall being amazed and delighted that you could get complete sets of JJ Johnson on Columbia and Teddy Wilson on Verve. What was available in shops (B&M) was so piecemeal by comparison. Anyway, I always bought in multiples amounting to 12 discs to capitalise on the overseas shipping rate, so my first purchase was three 4-disc sets: Jack Teagarden on Capitoi Kenton Presents Stuff Smith on Verve Still remember the thrill of opening the package and working my way through them. I bought the Johnson and Wilson in my next batch and both are still among my favourites. One day I hope to have the nerve to buy the ones that were already oop when I heard of Mosaic and which now cost big bucks: Shearing, Clayton, both Basie Roulettes, Condon, Ferguson and, of course, Nat Cole. One day...

Is Bud Shank plays Michel Legrand one of those World Pacific albums that Shank hated? I'd love a boxed set of those. Can any Legrandologists here say if this Anthology box is worth getting? PS: more info here: Autumn 2013 marks Legrand's great return to the music scene: two concerts with Natalie Dessay at The Olympia in Paris (October 28th and 29th) followed by a tour through France and Europe, and also his first memoirs, Rien n'est grave dans les aigus, to be published by the Cherche-Midi Editeur. To tie in with these events, Universal Classics & Jazz France has undertaken the most ambitious, abundantly prolific and extravagant record-project ever devoted to Michel Legrand: a 15CD boxed-set which brings together every face and aspect of every domain on the Legrand continent; in other words, songs, jazz, original film-soundtracks, symphonic works, musicals… Some of these CDs operate on the principle of pairing two original vinyl albums — c.f. the historic Legrand Jazz album together with his tribute to Richard Rodgers — while other discs are anthological and correspond to precise themes: international artists who have performed his work; arrangements and original songs; music for animated films… Here and there you can also find surprising guest-appearances, all by artists associated with the great Legrand: Sarah Vaughan, Stan Getz, Louis Armstrong, Yves Montand, Michael Jackson, Barbra Streisand, Jessye Norman… and also Alain Delon, singing his previously-unreleased French version of Windmills of your Mind. The classical side of Michel Legrand is also featured in this set through compositions carried by such wonderful soloists as Jean-Pierre Rampal, Maurice André or the divine harpist Catherine Michel, here on an original album — especially recorded for this set — of jazz standards re-orchestrated "classically" by Michel Legrand for a harp and symphony orchestra. The music here, steering a course between swing, lyricism and musical comedy, is an invitation on a journey through the universe of a musical giant, a creator who continues to vaporize frontiers in his love for music in the plural. I'm always up for a bit of frontier vapourising. How about you?

After Mosaic's complete Ella on Decca, Decca brings you the incomplete Ella on Decca and Verve. 10 CDs. Wonder if they had access to the metal parts? More than 200 tracks are newly remastered, with 8 CDs of studio recordings and 2 of live recordings, including a complete unreleased concert from the 1960s. Plus a 96-page book. Details and track listing at this German site. It's cheap enough at Amazon UK (£46.99), but this would have to be cheaper still to make it worth my while.