When I mentioned the day I bought 24 new CDs for under £35, I didn't tell you that 13 of those CDs came in a single set: this themed compilation of Duke Ellington's work from 1927-1948.
Why stop at 1948, I wonder? Could it be that the compilers, who put this out in 1999, restricted themselves to recordings that had reached the end of their 50-year copyright term.
I don't know what the current copyright term is in France, for it's the French who have put this together. And, unlike many of my previous too-good-to-be-true cheap compilations (1, 2, 3), this is a genuine bargain. I'm not a Duke expert, so I can't judge for sure, but it seems that plenty of thought and care has gone into the selections, and each disc has an attractive digipack with its own essay by 'artistic director' Claude Carrière.
It seems to be fairly rare, too, as though it was a limited edition released under the normal radar: the only traces I have found online are on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
Click on the image above to see the themes for each of the CDs: you'll see that, with titles like 'jungle' and 'ladies', political correctness is met with a gallic shrug. This organisation doesn't always work: the first CD, 'ballads', is hard to listen to all the way through because it's a whole hour at the same tempo.
But perhaps this means I should approach the set as a reference work rather than an introductory guide. As you may have guessed, after more than three years, I still have yet to make my way through all the discs (though I've crammed a few more discs in the last couple of days).
And did they make it a 13-disc set just so that they could spell out Duke's name on the spine of the CDs?
Have you read Geoff Dyer's But Beautiful
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