Fantasy Box Set League

Box sets are back, baby! Some of us old timers thought they might be gone for good after the CD crash (remember when Joe Henderson's The Milestone Years was going for twenty-bucks at your local mall?) But companies have realized that for those happy few who continue collecting "physical media," the big-ole stack of music still holds an appeal.

In these later days, when the audience for such extravagance is both smaller and crazier than that in the CD's heyday, sets tend to take two approaches. "Beyond Exhaustive" is for those boomers and Gen Xers who cannot get enough of a favorite popular artist—or album—of their youth. Bob Dylan's pre-rehearsal of the gleam of a germ of an idea for the fourth-best rendition of an alternate take? They'll buy it. Six discs of The Police's Synchronicity filled with live takes, alternate takes, left overs and B sides? They'll buy it. Four LP's of the late, great Jeff Beck jamming with his friends Bogert and Appice? Let's not push things.

"The Same But Nicer" is the (slightly) saner approach: just bundle together several catalog recordings by an artist, spiffed up with new remasters or all analogue pressings. In contrast to box sets of old (which loved to pull apart and reconstitute albums based on chronology, or stick a series of alternate takes right after the master), box sets today tend to treat the original albums as more or less sacred. And good for them.

Compact disc sets are still with us, and in some cases the only practical way to present a large swath of music, especially material that first appeared as a jumble of singles, EP's, outtakes and albums. But collectors of physical media have turned in large numbers to vinyl. The plastic resurgence encourages fairly conservative presentations of original LP's by vetted artists, as the financial commitment when buying several 180 gram platters in a box is substantial. Plus, it's just plain space intensive. Collectors don't want large-format renditions of third-rate material cluttering their shelves.

The jazz world has gingerly stepped into the fray. Blue Note offered a six LP Tone Poet set of Ornette Coleman's recordings for the label. Craft released sets of Sonny Rollins and, more surprisingly, Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis material. In the CD realm, Mosaic Records soldiers on after the death of Michael Cuscana, with repackaged Blue Note stalwarts and 78-era compilations. In tribute to the rising fascination with black plastic, Columbia is currently re-upping their Miles Davis Bootleg collections in vinyl and plans to continue releasing material by the trumpeter until approximately the heat death of the universe.

But collectors are never satisfied. Here are elevator pitches for four box sets that would be as artistically satisfying as most of the current offerings, if not more so. The only catch? They feature less well-known musicians. Please feel free to suggest your own fantasy sets in the comments section below.

The Complete Riverside Recordings of George Russell.

Serious students of jazz history know George Russell as the author of The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization. The less ambitious souls among us will be relieved to hear that along with being jazz's preeminent theorist, Russell was also a decent pianist and percussionist, an amazing composer/arranger, and a gifted bandleader. His most accessible and arguably best-realized work was done from the mid-fifties to the mid-sixties. During this period, he recorded several albums with a sextet featuring rotating personnel. Notable guest appearances include Eric Dolphy and Sheila Jordan, but the relative unknowns are all highly accomplished, characterful players. The tunes are hardly Tin Pan Alley, but they aren't hopelessly esoteric, either, and they display both ingenuity and humor. The arrangements are often breathtaking, with intricate intertwining lines and ear-tickling dissonances. Most strikingly, these tunes move. Recorded at the height of the hard bop era, when most performances rarely got pushed beyond a medium-up lope, Russell's Riverside albums aren't afraid to put the pedal to the metal.

Put these elements together, and you get four challenging but entertaining discs full of bright moments. The albums in question—Stratusphunk, Ezz-thetics, The Stratus Seekers, and The Outer View—admittedly have egghead titles and abstract artwork that signals "serious business afoot." But the actual music on offer is more fun, engaging, and downright entertaining than the packaging implies. Russell may be ambitious, but his ambitions pay off in delightful music, left of hard bop orthodoxy but never abstract or abrasive just to make a point.

In a perfect word, the set would comprise all of Russell's small group efforts of the era, which would pull in albums on Decca, Verve, and most crucially his brilliant debut on RCA records, the Jazz Workshop release featuring Bill ("the kid") Evans on piano. But label politics being what they are, we can settle for his four wonderful Riverside albums. If Craft can put out four discs of Eddie Lockjaw Davis cookbook sessions (and they did, and admittedly the results were a gas), surely they can release these discs by one of jazz's greatest unknowns.

The Complete 1970's Muse Recordings of Pat Martino.

Guitarist Pat Martino has one of the more fascinating biographies in jazz. He lost his memory, including his mastery of the guitar, due to a stroke in 1980 and had to rebuild his technique from scratch. Some consider his post-recovery recordings as his deepest efforts, but let's plump instead for the amazing series of records he made for the Muse label before his stroke: Footprints (a reissue of The Visit! on Cobblestone but too good to pass up), Live!, Consciousness, We'll Be Together Again, and Exit.

Martino's profile suffers from his status as a stylist rather than an innovator, a stylist whose most characteristic work appeared in a decade many jazz purists like to repress in their memories. He dabbled in fusion (on two seventies Warner Bros. albums which have their own charms) but mostly stuck to intense post-bop note-slinging. He's not going to head a chapter in any jazz textbooks, but in the seventies he made nothing but wonderful records. The man can just plain play, he had a good head for picking tunes, and his recordings sound great. In physical form, at least, these albums can be tough to track down, which is all the more reason a set will fill a gap for modern collectors. It's time for jazz fanatics to get over their seventies-phobia. A lot of great stuff was recorded that decade—it just didn't get much love at the time.

The outstanding albums in the set include Live!—where Martino uncorks a performance on "Sunny" for the ages—and We'll Be Together Again—a duet with keyboardist Gil Goldstein. The latter album is especially gorgeous, with Goldstein's gentle bed of electric piano evoking some of Martino's most expressive and delicate playing. But all of the Muse run is well worth hearing—and collecting in one place. The internet claims Savoy Jazz, a subsidiary of Nippon Columbia, now owns the Muse catalog. Neither entity seems particularly active in the marketplace in the moment. Get moving, Savoy.

The Complete Concord Recordings of Emily Remler.

Remler could be seen as the next exemplar of mainstream, Wes Montgomery influenced guitarist coming after Martino, and her half dozen recordings on Concord reveal her as a truly gifted stylist and increasingly promising composer. Unlike Martino, she did not get a second act, dying of heart failure at age 32 in 1990.

She made only one record after leaving Concord, and it was foray into fusion. For now, let's focus on the more traditional efforts made for a label that celebrated tradition. Firefly, Take Two, Transitions, Catwalk, Together, and East to Wes form the bulk of her recorded legacy. Concord has not kept this set of albums in print as it should. The availability of physical releases is spotty and even Remler's streaming presence is not exhaustive. It is far too difficult to track down what should be easily accessible recordings. Surely dubbing masters from the 1980s is no daunting archeological task.

Remler, like Martino, suffered from being seen as a stylist playing in a somewhat "old-fashioned' idiom. The eighties jazz scene was shadowed by titanic struggles between the "young lions" (who had major label backing and really nice suits) and the avant-traditionalists (who recorded on Black Saint and similar labels, wore more colorful threads, and made a lot less dough). Remler—white, female, and Jewish—didn't fit into either camp. Her gender was a novelty in the jazz world of the cocaine decade, and while it led to a certain amount of press attention, it is not clear that the write-ups helped her sales or reputation.

In current times, when women musicians are more widely accepted in jazz, Remler's gender should be an asset in the marketplace rather than a liability. The recent Resonance Records issue of two live dates from Las Vegas (the second of which absolutely cooks) will, with luck, remind lovers of the jazz mainstream what a talented and charismatic player she was. But it does little good to heighten awareness of a musician's talent when her recorded legacy is not readily available. Remler made six fantastic-sounding records for an admittedly sometimes stodgy label. They should get the deluxe treatment as vinyl-fetish objects pronto, before her profile begins to sink again.

Concord has been quiet on the reissue front, and admittedly a lot of their product changes hands at bargain prices in second-hand markets. But they should make an exception for Remler, a young artist who was peaking during her stay with the label, and who deserves a second hearing from jazz listeners who may have overlooked her during the heat of neo-con ascendance. A set of her recordings should be a low-effort no-brainer for Concord.

JoAnne Brackeen: Collected Works 1975-1981

All of these box sets are big asks, but here we truly enter the realm of fantasy. Brackeen, born 1938, was an almost exact contemporary of McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, and Keith Jarrett. If you haven't seen those five names in one sentence before, it's not due to Brackeen's lack of talent. She played professionally from a young age, but didn't lead her first session until 1975. It was the height of the fusion era. Her peers had either jumped on the electric bandwagon (Corea, Hancock), or had associations with great musicians of the previous generation to get them started as leaders (Jarrett with Miles Davis, Tyner with John Coltrane). Brackeen's stints with Art Blakey (she was the only female jazz messenger in that unit's storied history), Stan Getz, and Joe Henderson did not grant her that kind of profile. She kept the acoustic faith during hard times, and it goes without saying that a woman instrumentalist in the jazz field in the 1970s faced special challenges.

Her powerful, percussive touch on the piano has led to comparisons with McCoy Tyner, which is fine as long as one is careful to keep in mind how distinctive a talent she is. Both pianists set up vamps, from time to time, but Brackeen uses more advanced polyrhythms and harmonies. Both composed a bevy of tunes, but Brackeen's are thornier and, often, more humorous. Where McCoy tends to get ponderous from time to time, Brackeen is more prone to get weird. Tyner is a master of modal music. Brackeen is the master of Brackeen music.

Brackeen's albums from her first six years as a leader saw her working mostly in smaller formats. Mythical Magic is a solo outing; New True Illusion, Trinkets and Things, and Prism are duet sessions; Snooze, Invitation, Aft, Keyed In, and Special Identity are trios; Tring-a-ling and Ancient Dynasty feature guest tenor sax players. Her recordings feature excellent musicians—Clint Houston, Cecil McBee, and Eddie Gomez on bass, for instance, while Michael Brecker appears on the first quartet session and Joe Henderson on the second. She never sounds the least bit intimidated in such fast company. Some listeners may find her touch a bit hard and some performances possibly a bit obsessive. But she's a major figure and it's shocking how little attention she has received.

She cut eleven albums in six years—1981 was chosen as a stopping point because she didn't record again for a few years after that. Those albums were on a handful of different labels, and it is difficult to imagine how the rights could be sorted out for a single box. Given the number of recordings involved, a vinyl release might be impractical. Could Mosaic or a similar enterprise put together, say, a 7 or 8-CD set covering the period? It certainly would be challenging, but the real question is whether an audience could be found for it.

That question, though, is a bit circular. We love boxes of our favorite artists, but when we come across a box set featuring an unfamiliar name we are perhaps a little more willing to assume the music is worth exploring since it received such an expensive tribute. A recent example of this treatment would be the lavish set devote to harpist Dorothy Ashby's first six albums, which must have raised her profile in the hard-core jazz demographic at least a little.

All the sets described above are fantasies, Brackeen's most of all. But it someone had told me ten years ago that Dorothy Ashby was getting a six LP set dedicated to her leader dates, I would have recommended psychiatric help. Fingers crossed at least one of these gets wished into existence. If not, there are always streaming services, used record stores, and online merchants to search for access to outstanding recordings by these lesser-known but excellent musicians.

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