I had some Charlie Christian and Benny Goodman on earlier tonight, and it had both Mira and Celia dancing in their seats during dinner. And hearing Charlie Christian made me want to hear some Django Reinhardt, so I went downstairs and grabbed two JSP boxes that were hiding in the back shelves.

JSP (and in some ways, Properbox as well) have taken advantage of recordings going out of copyright, or of licensing recordings as they get ready to go out of copyright, and what this has meant to those of us who like early jazz is usually some pretty cheap box sets of music where the recordings have been cleaned up a bit. The Django boxes are generally well done. No documentation really (basically an article and personnel listings when possible) but packed CDs of music. In the early ‘90s, I had bought a 10 CD Django Reinhardt box-set that was an import distributed by Cema Distribution… the box was great, and I sold it to a friend (for pretty cheap) when he was having a rough time. I figured it would turn up again and I could re-purchase it, but it never happened. The two JSP boxes clock in at 9 CDs, and while it isn’t everything that was on that import box-set, it’s pretty close… and I’m sure it was a third the original boxes price.

Properbox has done an interesting job as well putting together some nice collections for around $30. I have a 4 CD Charlie Parker set to rip tonight (if I get to it) as well as a set called ‘BeBop Spoken Here’. Another set I previously ripped was a Lester Young collection that I enjoy quite a bit. These are old mono recordings, often transferred from disc. They will never sound great, but the performances are well worth having, and it is nice to see the label going to a large volume of sales rather then gouging the rare performance collector that would probably plop down serious cash for some of these recordings. Both of these labels have appeared in the waning days of the record store (or more precisely, the waning days of the CD). I imagine the parties putting these together see this, at least in some way, as a labor of love. These recordings won’t survive well in the MP3 age (they are too noisy and will just sound worse)… but in 5-10 years, when lossless recordings finally kill lossy formats.

We’ll see if the girls groove as much tomorrow night… I imagine they will.