Louis Armstrong – The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings (Columbia Legacy)
Nothing says Merry/Happy (insert holiday of your choice) like giving or getting a hefty box set of superlative music. Spanning a good chunk of the history of jazz, here are ten crucial compilations of endlessly inspired and inspiring examples of improvisatory genius. Proceeding in alphabetical order – because trying to rank this music qualitatively would just produce a ten-way tie for first place – and allowing only one selection per artist, I start with Armstrong’s most famous and influential work, the 1925-29 recordings that exude joyful blues and the essence of jazz. Endlessly tuneful, swinging hard before the swing era started, the material on these four CDs is as fresh and startling now as it was over 75-80 years ago.
Albert Ayler – Holy Ghost: Rare & Unissued Recordings (1962-70) (Revenant)
Avant icon Albert Ayler’s break with jazz orthodoxy made harmony an afterthought, elevated spontaneous, unpredictable pulses over regular beats, and made melody dominant, though not melodiousness: he made timbre and raw emotion his focus. This 10-CD set focuses on rare or previously unreleased – and often immensely historic – documents, including many burning concert performances, and spans nearly all of Ayler’s career, even his pre-free jazz style when he was in the Army.
Ornette Coleman – Beauty Is a Rare Thing: The Complete Atlantic Recordings (Rhino/Atlantic)
Another pioneer of free jazz, but more accessible in his innovations than Ayler, Ornette gave the alto sax a highly vocal inflection. This six-CD set contains the crucial albums The Shape of Jazz to Come, Change of the Century, This Is Our Music, Free Jazz, Ornette! , Ornette on Tenor, and three albums worth of additional tracks not released at the time of this fertile 1959-61 period comparable in intensity and influence to Coltrane’s contemporaneous outpouring on the same label. Nowadays, even mainstream figures acknowledge the compositional influence of at least the first three albums, starring his iconic quartet with Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, and Billy Higgins or Ed Blackwell. There’s not a minute of dross here.
John Coltrane – The Classic Quartet: Complete Impulse! Studio Recordings (Impulse!)
The classic Coltrane Quartet (with pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison, and drummer Elvin Jones) infused modal jazz with deeper meaning. challenging yet accessible. This eight-CD set of 1961-65 recordings includes four complete albums (Coltrane, Ballads, A Love Supreme, Crescent) plus large chunks of many others, offering a comprehensive look at one of the greatest, most adventurous bands ever. On A Love Supreme, Coltrane’s playing sounds like primal vocalization and draws listeners into its profound musical utterances through chant-like themes and exploratory, heaven-seeking improvisations.
Miles Davis – The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions (Columbia Legacy)
This 1969 double album Bitches Brew—with an expanded electric band—took the then-revolutionary Fusion style combining jazz and rock (mostly just rock’s electric instruments and more aggressive beats) to more avant-garde realms. Though jazz purists were aghast, it actually is as texturally based and colorful in timbre (notably shaded by bass clarinet) as Davis’s earlier work with Gil Evans—but it grooves a lot harder and shouts where the earlier stuff whispered.
Duke Ellington – Never No Lament: The Blanton-Webster Band (RCA Victor)
The Duke Ellington big band of 1940-42, covered in depth by this three-CD set, was the most talented and historically important band of the swing era. When Ben Webster joined in 1940, he was the group’s first important saxophonist. “Cotton Tail,” an uptempo number, was Webster’s signature tune with the band, but it was as a ballad player that he was most distinctive and influential. Jimmy Blanton in his short life established the potential of the bass as a melodic and solo instrument by moving away from simple 4/4 thumping on the roots of chords; “Ko Ko,” “Jack the Bear,” and “Concerto for Cootie” feature the first important bass solos in the history of jazz. The third major element in the transformation of the band’s sound was composer/arranger Billy Strayhorn, who began working with Ellington in 1939. And nobody has ever voiced a saxophone section more exquisitely or distinctively than Ellington himself.
Billie Holiday – Lady Day: The Complete Billie Holiday on Columbia (1933-44) (Columbia Legacy)
This 10-CD, 230-track set (with 35 tracks previously unreleased in the U.S.) basically captures most of Holiday’s first decade of recording, when her voice was still fresh and bad habits had not taken a noticeable toll. The joys of this material include its variety: Holiday was not yet typecast (as she would be in the 1950s) as a mournful songbird abused by her lovers, so many upbeat and uptempo songs—even ones she’d continue singing in later years—move with greater alacrity in her youth. The material is organized sensibly, with alternate takes bunched on the last few discs rather than creating repetition in the chronologically proceeding master takes that occupy the first six-and-a-half CDs. Air checks from radio broadcasts are scattered among the alternates, along with Holiday’s film appearance with the Duke Ellington Orchestra, “Saddest Tale.”
Thelonious Monk – The Complete Riverside Recordings (Riverside)
Few 15-CD sets are as consistently rewarding as this one. Starting with two efforts specifically designed to ease the public into Monk’s unique sound – trio albums of standards and Ellington tunes, respectively – it proceeds to such peaks of creativity as Brilliant Corners, collaborations with tenor greats Coleman Hawkins and John Coltrane and baritone saxist Gerry Mulligan, the Five Spot club concerts with tenorman Johnny Griffin that might be Monk’s best live albums, the famous Town Hall big band concert, and much more.
Charlie Parker – The Complete Savoy and Dial Studio Recordings (Savoy)
Parker was the finest horn soloist since Coleman Hawkins, the greatest alto saxophonist ever, and the epitome of bebop. The 1945-47 sessions that are the focus of this three-CD set are as crucial to jazz’s legacy as anything ever recorded, full of ground-breaking improvisations by the leader and sometimes by his band-mates, including at various times trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie (the Lou Gehrig to Parker’s Babe Ruth), Howard McGhee, and Miles Davis, tenor saxophonists Wardell Gray and Lucky Thompson, trombonist J.J. Johnson, pianists Bud Powell, Errol Garner, John Lewis, the underrated Dodo Marmarosa, and Duke Jordan, and drummer Max Roach.
Various Artists – Golden Years of the Soviet New Jazz, Volumes I-IV (Leo)
I think the most fascinating jazz scene outside of the U.S. was in Russia in the 1980s and early ‘90s. These four sets (okay, I’m cheating) of four CDs each come from the label that best documented that scene, and offer an extensive overview through reissued recordings and previously unreleased material. Vol. 1: Vyacheslav Guyvoronsky/Vladimir Volkov; Sergey Kuryokhin; Valentina Ponomareva; Anatoly Vapirov. Vol. II: Vladimir Rezitsky & Jazz Group Arkhangelsk; Orkestrion; Mikhail Chekalin featuring the Sergey Trofimov New Jazz Trio; Petras Vysniauskas; Ganelin/Vysniauskas/Talas. Vol. III: Homo Liber (Yuri Yukechev & Vladimir Tolkachev); Vladimir Chekasin Big Bands; Sainkho Namchylak; Tri-O; Andrew Solovyev & Igor Grigoriev; Vlad Makarov. Vol. IV: various combinations of members of the Ganelin Trio, my favorite Russian jazz group (and I’m not alone in that opinion), and their individual bands: Vyacheslav Ganelin, Vladimir Chekasin, and Vladimir Tarasov. It’s impossible to adequately characterize these diverse groups in this space, but any lovers of avant-garde surprises, free improvisation, and unexpected juxtapositions will be amply rewarded. These sets are limited editions; they are still available three and four years after their release, but don’t count on that forever. You can find them at
the Leo website’s Golden Years catalog.
