Still the leader of the pack when it comes to reissues, the Verve Music Group has had a banner year with a wealth of intriguing product that comes from a vast number of catalogs in their holdings including Verve, Mercury, Argo/Cadet, MGM, Smash, and Phillips. The LPR series, which stands for LP reproduction, attempts to package facsimile reissues with the same aesthetic values as the original 12” vinyl records. These cardboard digi-pak style sets are remastered with excellent sound to boot and are available at a modest and affordable price, an important factor when so many great ones are coming out and you just have to have them all! This time around, the latest set of LPR’s has a theme running through them, mainly that each album is led by a saxophonist. So in no particular order, here’s a look at them all.

Although he tended to record more than the market seemed to bear at times and not all that shined was pure gold, Sonny Stitt’s tenure with Verve did produce some fine recordings, like the 1956 set New York Jazz. In the company of pianist Jimmy Jones, bassist Ray Brown, and drummer Jo Jones, Stitt wields his alto and tenor saxophones mightily over the course of ten selections, mostly standards and three basic Stitt originals. The quick pace of “Twelfth Street Rag” is typical of the brand of bebop that Stitt specialized in over the course of his career. He throws off phrase after phrase with obvious ease and in utilizing the tenor horn he sounds more like himself than his tendency to echo Charlie Parker when playing the alto. Long unavailable, this Stitt set ranks among his best and comes highly recommended.

As a high school music teacher in Florida, Cannonball Adderley’s impact on jazz was limited, but once he made his way to New York in the summer of 1955 things began to click and in no time he was recording material for both the Savoy and EmArcy labels. In August of that year he cut Julian “Cannonball” Adderley with his brother Nat and a six piece group arranged and conducted by Quincy Jones. The program is split almost evenly among standards and tunes from the pen of Jones. Sound quality is top notch even at this early date and there’s an admirable balance between Adderley’s alto and the rest of the ensemble that compliments the entire production without taking away from the leading man. Although his bop chops are well in evidence, it’s Adderley’s ballad work on gems like “Purple Shades” that most impresses, along with the handiwork of Jones.

Somewhat of an iconoclast, Jimmy Giuffre has been exploring some of the more cerebral elements of jazz since his first recordings for Capitol back in the mid ‘50s. In terms of his legacy, he will be most remembered for an outstanding series of albums he led for Atlantic in the late ‘50s and for his 1963 Columbia set Free Fall. In between however, there’s his great body of work cut for Verve which isn’t better known simply because it’s largely unavailable currently. Getting things on the right track is the reissue of the 1959 release The Easy Way, which features Giuffre on clarinet, tenor and baritone saxophones, Jim Hall on guitar, and Ray Brown on bass. During this time period Giuffre rarely worked with a drummer (although a live set with a quartet on Verve is out there; another album long overdue for reissue!), which may put some off. But there’s still a vibrant swing to be found in the performances that makes them quite accessible. Worth special notice is the debut of Hall’s classic piece “Careful” in what is surely a definitive performance.

Among the landscape of exemplary saxophone led dates, one must hold a special place for Motion, a rare trio outing for Lee Konitz in the company of bassist Sonny Dallas and drummer extraordinaire Elvin Jones. The 1961 sessions that produced the original album have been packaged prior in complete form on a now out-of-print three-disc set so what we have here is the album as it was originally released with five lengthy performances. That Jones, in particular, inspires Konitz to new heights should go without saying. What might be a surprise is how intense and fluid the saxophonist is in his improvisations, putting to an end any remaining myths about the ‘cool school’s’ inability to engage in heated bop solos. The recorded sound has always been problematic, yet this edition seems to get more things right than any previous one. That aside, this album is an undeniable keeper.