Franklin Mint: "The Greatest Jazz Recordings Of All Time"

Back in the 70s when I was in junior high school, I subscribed to one of the monthly record clubs. I can't remember which one it was -- Columbia House, BMG, and RCA were all popular -- but their advertisements were everywhere, promising deals like: "10 Albums For Only One Cent!" You did indeed get 10 albums for a penny, but the catch was that you were obliged to order another four or five albums at full price over the course of the year.

In addition, each month you received a catalog announcing the "Selection Of The Month."  If you wanted the selection, you did nothing, and the album would be shipped to you at full retail price plus shipping and handling. If you didn't want the selection, you returned an attached post card saying not to ship the album. Naturally, the clubs counted on a lot of their subscribers forgetting to return the post card and paying for the album. I was pretty diligent about returning the card and only ordered the bare minimum required. I'm pretty sure I came out way ahead. I still have a few old LPs in my collection (including a Led Zeppelin IV cut by George Peckham) that have "Record Club" stickers on the jackets.

One of the most enduring of the "subscription" mail order firms is the Franklin Mint Society. Founded back in 1964, The Franklin Mint has sold books, coins, dolls, plates, knives, and diecast classic cars by the millions. From time to time, The Franklin Mint has also offered record sets. Anyone who has spent time rummaging through used records in thrift stores has surely come across sets from their 50-box collection of "The 100 Greatest Recordings Of All Time." Judging from the number of these sets that I find, apparently every home in America had a subscription to the series at one time or another. It may have been required by law. For the casual listener, it wasn't a bad way to assemble a collection of classical music's greatest hits. And since you can find the boxes today for 25 cents or a dollar, they're still a good deal. As a bonus, they are usually in very good condition since people liked the idea of owning a collection of classical music, but no one ever actually played them.

A few months ago at an estate sale, I found a collection of Franklin Mint albums entitled: "The Greatest Jazz Recordings Of All Time." There were 25 handsome box sets, with gold lettering on the covers and leather bindings. Each box contained four LPs, pressed on 160-gram, dark red vinyl, for a total of 100 albums. Many of the sets covered a stylistic theme or time period, such as "Great Jazz Inventors -- Davis, Mingus, Monk" or "Cool Jazz-Third Stream -- Baker, Getz, Brubeck, Mulligan, Konitz, MJQ." The red vinyl was stunning, and every disk I examined looked absolutely mint. They were priced at $12 per set, so I decided to grab five and see if they were any good. I thought I could come back the next day and get the rest if they turned out to be interesting.

Once I got them home and started to do a little research on the Interwebs, I discovered that these sets are quite collectible and much appreciated by jazz fans -- not only for the quality of the pressings, but for the extremely well-done selection of tracks and artists. The collection was curated over a period of several years (1983-85) by the noted jazz critic and music scholar Dan Morgenstern. At the time, Morgenstern was the director of Rutgers University at Newark's Institute of Jazz Studies, one of the world's greatest collections of jazz recordings, memorabilia, and other cool jazz-related stuff.

Morgenstern raided the Institute's collection for rare 78s and other obscure recordings that in some cases have been out of print for decades, Of course, he also includes selections from dozens of seminal albums by jazz greats from Louis Armstrong to Pat Metheny. In all, there are some 1,200 tracks on the 100 albums.

In general, I'm not a fan of collections of any kind of music. As a rule I never buy greatest hits collections by rock or jazz artists. If I like an artist, then I want to have the individual albums so I can appreciate the work as a whole and in context. But in the case of some jazz pioneers or obscure artists from the 40s and 50s, it's not practical or even possible to track down their recordings. So these Franklin Mint sets are a great find. And even though I have many of the individual tracks on the original albums, Morgenstern does a great job of selecting cuts that highlight the development of a particular instrument or style of jazz. In the case of one of the sets I bought (Volume 16) "Cool Jazz - Third Stream," it's fascinating to hear tracks by artists I've never heard of (Cy Touff, Andre Hodeir, Lennie Niehaus - anyone? anyone?) alongside cuts by Miles Davis, Lee Konitz, Gerry Mulligan, and others who came to define the Cool Jazz genre.

Each box set comes with a 20-page glossy booklet by Morgenstern or another noted jazz writer, providing historical context and giving a track-by-track discussion of the music. After spinning a few of the albums, I rushed back over to the estate sale to pick up the rest of the boxes. Naturally they were gone. But I've been able to pick up more online, and now have 20 out of the 25 boxes.

If you ever stumble across any of these sets in good condition at a thrift store or used record sale, don't hesitate to buy them. Complete sets in mint condition go for around $300-400, and individual boxes are usually around $25 on Ebay. The dark red disks look stunning, and the pressings on 160-gram virgin vinyl are stellar - dead flat and quiet.

Enjoy the music!