WHEN I checked out the web-site for Ken Burns’s documentary on jazz (http://www.pbs.org/jazz), I was surprised to find that not a single record company is listed among the sponsors. Since jazz accounts for a mere three percent of record sales, I assume that record labels must be hoping the series generates as much interest for their back catalog as Burns’s previous documentaries did for Civil War history and baseball. At least two record labels, Verve and Sony Legacy, do have tie-ins with the show, compilation discs of many of the artists whose work is examined there.

Cuscuna and Lourie met in 1975, when Lourie, then the marketing director for Blue Note, hired Cuscuna to do research in the Blue Note recording vaults.  Like many executives and record producers who preceded them in jazz, such as John Hammond and Orin Keepnews, Cuscuna and Lourie loved the music and brought a fanatic’s zeal to their mission. With Cuscuna as producer, Blue Note began reissuing recordings that had long been out of print. Cuscuna also discovered a large number of sessions that Blue Note never got around to releasing and began making some of them available to listeners. Mosaic was born when Capital Records, which owns Blue Note, took a pass on a suggestion from Cuscuna and Lourie that Blue Note should release boxed sets of work by its artists. 

When Mosaic began, boxed sets were a rarity. CDs were just beginning to be widely distributed and Mosaic’s first sets were pressed on vinyl. The last ten years have seen a glut of boxed sets, some of great value (The Complete Stax/Volt Singles), others of little or questionable value (take your pick).  Mosaic may have anticipated the trend but it never compromised its quality or its vision of how the music should be presented. 

Mosaic produces limited edition boxed sets that are available only through them by mail order.  The company’s attention to detail reflects the seriousness with which it regards jazz and jazz scholarship. It presents jazz from nearly all periods of its history and because it doesn’t limit the subjects of its sets to household names, it often reclaims the work of some great musicians whom time has unfairly forgotten.

Mosaic’s sets are limited to runs of 5000 to 7500 copies on disc and LP1  (a Charlie Parker set, The Complete Dean Benedetti Recordings of Charlie Parker, is not a limited-edition). The sets are housed in an elegant 12” X 12” box with a laminated cover that features a black and white photograph from one of the recording sessions.  Enclosed with the music is a full sized booklet that contains a biography of the featured musician, as well as a critical evaluation of the sessions contained in the set, which are carefully documented. The booklet also contains quite a few black and white photographs from the original sessions, all beautifully reproduced.  Anyone who remembers carefully reading a record cover while listening to music can appreciate what a pleasure it is to hold and read an LP cover sized book with easily readable print and great photos. 

A small list of currently available Mosaic sets demonstrates the uniqueness of their approach: The Complete Blue Note Hank Mobley Fifties Sessions; The Atlantic New Orleans Jazz Sessions; The Complete Kid Ory Verve Sessions; The Complete Pacific Jazz Recordings of the Chico Hamilton Quintet; The Complete Illinois Jacquet Sessions 1945-50.  Nine discs comprise Anita O’Day’s sessions for Verve/Clef. A four-disc set brings together all of Donald Byrd’s Blue Note studio recordings with Pepper Adams. 

Cuscuna’s archival skills have been put to good use by a number of labels. His name appears on reissued discs on Impulse, Sony Legacy (he was executive producer of the vastly improved Kind of Blue), and Capital Records, whose vast jazz catalog includes recordings they obtained from United Artists, Pacific Jazz, Roulette, and Blue Note. When Mosaic began, it was unusual for a record label to go back to the original session tapes in an effort to restore a take that was edited for an LP release. 2  Once Mosaic established this practice, which Cuscuna and Lourie extended to their reissues of individual sessions on Blue Note, the rest of the industry began to follow suit.

While it is certainly the case that the increased capacity of CDs has enabled record companies to offer complete, unedited, historically accurate performances on disc, it was not a practice they submitted to voluntarily. Consider the first CD reissue of Miles Ahead by Miles Davis and Gil Evans. Columbia Records hired Teo Macero to help with the digital remastering of Davis’s Columbia Records catalog. Macero was the producer for many of Davis’s records for the label, although he didn’t produce Miles Ahead.  The final release used many alternate takes rather than the originals (for reasons that aren't entirely clear--the alternate takes may have been chosen because they were in stereo, but the final product was pseudo stereo anyway).  Most critics felt the alternate takes were inferior to the originals. 

A few years later, Columbia released a second Miles Ahead CD, with the original producer, George Avakian, overseeing the remastering. He used the original takes. Columbia may have felt pressured into doing the remaster because of complaints from critics and jazz fans about the quality of the first disc. I believe a more important factor was that Cuscuna and Lourie, through Mosaic and Blue Note, had set a precedent of presenting music accurately and had created a jazz marketplace where an inferior Miles Ahead just wouldn’t do. 3

A listing of Mosaic’s releases through the years would include some big names, such as Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Art Blakey.  Yet their most important contribution may be that they make available the work of musicians who seem to have fallen through the cracks. They put together two Ike Quebec sets, a complete set of Serge Chaloff sessions (a vital link to players like Gerry Mulligan and Pepper Adams), and a collection of Blue Note sessions by Tina Brooks.  Those sets are out of print, but available sets by Arthur Hill, Woody Shaw, and a Thad Jones small group collection serve a similar purpose: To make available once again the important contributions of musicians whose work shouldn’t be lost.

The Complete Blue Note Horace Parlan Sessions, a recent Mosaic release, highlights the accomplishments of a pianist who is best known for his work on an essential jazz album, Charles Mingus’s Mingus Ah Um.  Some of Parlan’s Blue Note recordings as a leader are available as expensive Japanese imports and Classic Records produced a limited edition pressing of one of the sessions included on the Mosaic set, On the Spur of the Moment.   Otherwise, his work is only available here in the US on Steeplechase, a UK label, and those recordings were all done long after his Blue Note work.

Parlan was stricken with polio at age 5, and as a result lost use of the fourth and fifth fingers on his right hand.  His style is heavily rhythmic and shot through with blues and gospel (his father was a minister). Discs one and two of the five disc set include three trio sessions from 1961 (conga player Ray Barretto joins the third session on a few tracks) and those recordings give us an opportunity to hear Parlan’s approach more closely.  He doesn’t play long, expansive melodies. He develops his solos by combining short melody runs with interval and chordal examinations of the harmonic possibilities of the song.  Tension grows out of the rhythm attack of his right hand as he skirts over notes, hits a hard chord or repeats a phrase from different rhythmic angles, and then drops to a softer advance while his left hand solidly holds down the structure of the song.  As strongly blues based as his playing is, he doesn’t coast on familiar riffs.

The next two sessions, one from July 1960 and one from March 1961, are quintet recordings featuring Parlan with Stanley and Tommy Turrentine.  Tommy’s slightly raspy trumpet tone blends well with his brother’s tenor sax. Once again, the songs are very blues influenced, a musical platform that always brought out Stanley Turrentine’s best. Parlan’s support for both horn players contains some unexpected chord changes that anticipate and underline each soloist’s lines. Parlan’s own no-nonsense approach to solos is matched by Tommy Turrentine’s economical playing.  

The two remaining sessions are a quintet recording from 1961 with Booker Ervin and Grant Green and a sextet with Ervin, Green, and Johnny Coles from 1963.  Ervin's tone is more open and his approach more urgent than Stanley Turrentine's and the overall feel of the session where he is the only horn is more spare, since Grant Green is taking what would usually be the second horn position. Parlan's comping on this session and the session with Coles feels darker, the chords at times more dissonant than in the other sessions in the set. It's Ervin's unique voice that causes the shift.  Even a track like "A Tune for Richard," which sounds like a standard Blue Note hard bop composition, moves into an entirely different direction during Ervin's solo (the tune is his). Johnny Coles's work makes you realize how underrecorded he was and makes you wonder why. Grant Green is, as always, endlessly inventive, his tone instantly recognizable but his melodies always unique.

Horace Parlan's unique approach is featured on great recordings by Lou Donaldson (Sunny Side Up), Dexter Gordon (Doin' Alright), and Booker Ervin (Exultation!).  He played on the 1961 sessions of the great British tenor player, Tubby Hayes.  He moved to Denmark in 1972 and has done a lot of recording with other expatriate jazz musicians, such as Archie Shepp. After listening to and absorbing the Mosaic set, I pulled other recordings on which he played and found that I was consistently impressed with the impact he had on the tone of the sessions. His amazing chordal shifts provide tremendous support and possibilities for improvisers and when he enters for his own solos the energy level rises a notch.

Soon after I began writing this piece, I was saddened to read that Charlie Lourie died at age 60 after a long illness. I wish he'd had more time. Lourie left behind so many great sets, so many tributes to the vitality of jazz. The message that he and Mosaic delivered again and again, and will surely continue to deliver in his absence, is that attention must be paid to these musicians, to the forgotten as much as to the well known.

W.H. Auden once observed of literature, "Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered."  He was describing a phenomenon that occurs in all the arts. In recorded music, greatness can be rediscovered when records are returned to print.  Scholars can place someone like Horace Parlan in the right context and those of us who are collectors can search through our libraries to find him and learn where he helped jazz achieve its greatness.

Charlie Lourie left a legacy of beautifully presented, perfectly restored sets of recordings by musicians whose contribution to jazz is incalculable. One of his favorites was Tina Brooks, who was the leader of a mere four sessions. Mosaic gathered those sessions together so we could be reminded that Tina Brooks mattered. Four great sessions is more than most of us will do.

You can request a catalog from Mosaic at http://www.mosaicrecords.com/ or call them at 203-327-7111. 

- Joseph Taylor