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!

Anita O'Day & The Three Sounds

Verve Records V-8514

1962 Mono Release

NM/NM

A while back, my wife and I were looking around an antiques store in Pittsboro, NC. We poked around a bit, and in the back I spotted a couple of boxes of albums. Along with the usual 1960s soundtracks, a few forlorn classical titles, and a nearly complete collection of Nancy Sinatra albums, there were a few gems, including this Verve Records original pressing by Anita O'Day.

Anita O'Day got her start singing in clubs in Chicago in the late 1930s. Her big break came when jazz and big band drummer Gene Krupa hired her in 1941. Based on recordings she made with Krupa, Downbeat magazine named her "New Star Of The Year."  After Krupa was

arrested and imprisoned for possession

of marijuana in 1943, O'Day worked with Woody Herman's and Stan Keaton's bands. In 1947, O'Day herself was arrested on a marijuana possession charge and spent 90 days in a Los Angeles jail. Once out of the slammer, O'Day spent the next several years with Herman and Keaton and also performed with Count Basie in New York. O'Day was arrested again in 1953 on another marijuana charge, but the case was dismissed. Unfortunately, at about the same time, she began using heroin and was arrested once again. She served six months in prison before being released in 1954. She would continue to struggle with heroin addiction for many years, nearly dying from an overdose in 1967.  Despite her drug dependency and troubles with the law, O'Day had a very successful recording career. She cut her first solo album in 1952, entitled Anita O'Day Sings Jazz. The album appeared on Norgran Records, the very first 12" LP issued on the legendary Norman Granz' brand new label. O'Day made a second record for Norgran in 1955, and when Granz founded Verve Records in 1956, she followed him there. In all, O'Day would make 15 records for Verve. The last of these was Anita O'Day & The Three Sounds, released in 1962.

Anita O'Day & The Three Sounds is unusual because O'Day only sings on six of the ten songs. The other four tracks are instrumentals that feature The Three Sounds, who also play backup on the vocal tracks. The Three Sounds were formed in 1956 in Benton Harbor, Michigan, and were "discovered" by saxophone great Lou Donaldson while playing in New York a few years later. Though never a block-buster group, they recorded dozens of albums as a solo act and as a backup band before they broke up in 1973.

The overall mood of Anita O'Day & The Three Sounds is light and swinging, with straight-ahead readings by O'Day and tasteful backing by The Three Sounds. There is an excellent and uncredited trumpet solo by Roy Eldridge on "Whisper Not" that makes the cut one of the album's highlights. Even still, the album was not warmly received. Some reviewers criticized O'Day for "phoning in" her performance since her contract with Verve was expiring.

When I bought the record, the vinyl looked very clean, but the jacket was in a dirty plastic outer sleeve that had been stapled to the back opening of the gatefold jacket, which meant I couldn't really examine the jacket without fear of damaging it. When I got it home, I found that the previous owner had not only stapled the outer sleeve to the back of the jacket, he had glued the edges of the dust sleeve to the inside of the LP pocket. I carefully removed the staples and used a box cutter to gently extract the dust sleeve.

Once I got the outer sleeve off, I was delighted to find that the jacket was mint (well, except for the very tiny staple holes in the back.) It literally looks like it was made yesterday with not a touch of ring wear and only very slight edge wear to one corner. It is a gatefold jacket, and appears to have never been opened. On the inside are extensive liner notes by Jack Fuller, who wrote jazz criticism for the Chicago Tribune, where he went on to become editor and win a Pulitzer Prize. The back of the jacket still has the original store sales sticker. The album was purchased from a store called "Del Padre" for $3.79. Which is considerably less than I paid 55 years later. Likewise, the vinyl is flawless and still has the shine of a new record. I gave it a wash on my VPI 16.5 record cleaner and put it on my dedicated mono turntable. The vinyl is flat and dead quiet. Not a tick on the record. The overall sound is excellent, with great dynamics and a nice "3rd row center" feel you get from mono recordings.

Credits:

Anita O'Day - Vocals
Gene Harris - Piano
Bill Dowdy - Drums
Andrew Simpkins - Bass
Roy Eldridge - Trumpet (uncredited)
Creed Taylor - Producer
Engineer - Val Valentin

The deadwax information is:

Side 1: V8514 SIDE 1 62VG244 RE-1 ["S" MGM pressing plant stamp] see below
Side 2: V8514 SIDE 2 62VG245 RE-1 ["S" MGM pressing plant stamp] see below

The dead wax has an MGM pressing plant stamp because Granz sold the Verve label to MGM in December, 1960. MGM continued to use the iconic black and silver "T" label on its Verve releases, adding a line at the bottom of the label that read "MGM Records - A Division of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc. - Made in U.S.A." The album has a 1.25" (32mm) pressing groove in the center which (along with the S stamp in the deadwax) confirms that it was pressed at MGM's plant in Bloomfield, NJ.  The plant was used until 1972 when MGM was sold to Polygram.




Oh, I bought the Nancy Sinatra albums as well. I'm a sucker for 60s schmaltzy pop. They turned out to be NM German pressings. Another great find. They're so bad, they're good.

Enjoy the music!