Building a Survey of Jazz: A Brief Summary of the Larger Jazz-Related Collections in My Library
I have a decent starter-collection of jazz vinyl, focusing primarily on Miles Davis' catalog including the 6LP
Miles at the Fillmore box set, as well as a selection of the better quality big band box sets on wax. But I've been working on building the digital portion of my jazz collection, the larger box sets of which total 1,626 albums. These highlights help me add a sense of order to the 22,000 jazz recordings in my digital library.
To date, my focus has been on essential classics, vocal jazz standards, the crooners, tin pan alley, jazz pop (1920-1960), highlights of avant-garde jazz, the big bands, swing, a bit of ECM, future jazz (in the electronic realm), film noir scores, gypsy jazz / jazz manouche, and their related subgenres. I've been in the mood to explore The Great American Songbook, (jazz vocal standards by Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Ellington, etc), so I started doing some research.
I'm no jazz expert, but some preliminary Google searches, list-generators, and review surveys provided me with sufficient information to begin building a respectable personal library. One intriguing release offered for sale on Toronto's JazzFM website was an astonishingly large 500 CD box set called,
The World's Greatest Jazz Collection. Of course, due to licensing restrictions, the set lacks some of the classic milestone recordings which come to mind when such a title is raised, but the sound quality and sheer volume of the collection warranted its addition to my library.
The 500-CD
World's Greatest Jazz Collection comprises five 100-disc sub sets:
- 100-CD Bebop Story box set
- 100-CD The Big Bands box set
- 100-CD Classic Jazz box set
- 100-CD Modern Jazz box set
- 100-CD Swing Time box set
Next I tackled building discographic archives of key figures in the history of classic and modern jazz. Larger jazz artist discographies in my archive include but are not limited to the following:
- 156-CD Thelonious Monk discography
- 135-CD Keith Jarrett discography
- 100-CD RateYourMusic.com's Top 100 Future Jazz LPs
- 98-CD Miles Davis discography
- 78-CD Jimmy Smith discography
- 75-CD Sun Ra discography
- 61-CD Ornette Coleman discography
- 52-CD Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers discography
- 43-CD Herbie Hancock discography
- 43-CD Jimmy McGriff discography
- 40-CD Duke Ellington discography
- 35-CD Charles Mingus discography
- 30-CD John Coltrane discography
- 22-CD Dave Brubeck discography
- 16-CD Future Sounds of Jazz box set
as well as the 16-CD Diana Krall discography. (My late father was a fan and sparked my interest in her catalog when I was starting college.)
And as I've discussed in former features, I worked hard to build analog and digital archives of the finest big band collections ever issued to the public. Some of these were exclusively available from mail order subscription services on vinyl and later on compact disc, but thankfully, archivists around the world have painstakingly digitized the vinyl-exclusive volumes and produced complete digital libraries of these sets at professional archival quality.
In my Big Band Archive I have:
- 30-LP box set of Time Life: The Big Bands
- 27-CD Ken Burns Jazz Series and Jazz: The Story of America’s Music (22-CD + 5CD)
- 11-LP box set of The Great Band Era
- 10-volume Benny Goodman Collection
- 7-volume The Big Bands box set
- 4-CD Smithsonian Big Band Jazz archive
- 2-disc Glenn Miller Gold Collection
- 1-CD The Glenn Miller Orchestra Collection
Other smaller and more precisely-focused jazz collections in my library include:
- 8 CDs from the Jazz Moods series
- 6 of the essential albums by The Bill Evans Trio
- 6-CD Gypsy Jazz / Jazz Manouche box set
- 5-CD 100 Hits American Songbook box set which includes one hundred standards recorded by Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Tony Bennett, Billie Holiday, Nat King Cole, Shirley Bassey, Sammy Davis Jr, and more.
- 5-CD Film Noir jazz series collection
- 3-CD Complete Recordings of Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong
- and the single-disc Complete Recordings of Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong
My collection is leagues away from exhaustive or complete in the vast scope of the world of jazz - an insurmountable task for certain, but I've done my best to construct a modest library showcasing the key subgenres I enjoy most. These will provide me with years of listening enjoyment on lazy Sundays and on my afternoon drives queued up in the car from my personal media server.
In an effort to determine the best recordings to sample first, I began compiling various “best-of” lists. Rateyourmusic user erikfish found 22 "top jazz albums of all time" lists in books, magazines and web sites and combined them into one meta-list
here. And TheJazzResource.com compiled a similar list of the
Top 25 Jazz Albums of All Time. Spinditty published a feature on
Ten Coltrane Albums Every Jazz Fan Should Own and NPR put together a similar roster called
The Cocktail Party Guide To John Coltrane. I also assembled some of my own lists including Modal Jazz Essentials, Recordings of the First Great Quintet (Davis and Trane in ‘56), as well as 17 Essential Hard Bop Recordings courtesy of critic Scott Yanow and a Top Ten Essentials list of Thelonious Monk LPs.
I would love to hear your recommendations for your favorite titles from the collections mentioned above which deserve priority listening, or your suggestions for other collections which would complement my current library. If I've any glaring omissions, please let me know! I'm always eager to learn.