Boxed sets lead the way forward: lovingly-packaged collections set to tempt music fans.(Jazz)

Such is the popularity of jazz boxed sets that they have become almost a genre in their own right.

Warner Jazz has issued boxed sets at a steady rate, its most substantial offering to date being a 20-CD Miles Davis "suitcase" covering his complete recordings of concerts performed at the Montreux jazz festival over several decades. John McLaughlin gets a similar treatment this year with a 16-CD overview of the great British guitarist's gigs at the famous Swiss jamboree, which is released in mid-December, while Duke Ellington's five-CD Reprise Studio Recordings is out now. At Columbia, the four-CD Count Basie collection, America's Number One Band and Miles Davis' five-CD Complete Jack Johnson Sessions are the mouthwatering products leading the charge this year.

Universal Jazz saw in last Christmas with Legacy, Ravi Coltrane's choice of his father John's Impulse! Recordings, and this Christmas it has put out Charlie Parker's Complete Verve Master Takes, a three-CD account of the sessions Parker recorded with Verve founder Norman Granz.

"The key is that people like the idea of something real that they can keep," says Sony Jazz head of marketing Adam Sieff "You don't download a boxed set. It's more than just a CD in a jewel case, it's a beautiful thing people want to own because it is way more than just the music, it is also all the information and history that comes with it and that's vital for bringing younger people into the music. We did tremendously well with our Louis Armstrong Complete Hot Fives And Sevens which was basically a great book and a bunch of CDs. From the whole package people--by reading as well as listening will have understood that he was like the Jimi Hendrix of his time."

Each boxed set is an individual project that has different criteria for pricing. Miles' Jack Johnson retails at around the 50 [pounds sterling] mark, while Count Basie's America's Number One Band is 30 [pounds sterling].

"With Basie, the packinging costs much less and there is also the fact that you don't want to overprice material that may a]ready be out there," says Sieff.

The Miles boxed set--his eighth "complete" set in the 12 years since his death--is already one of the most controversial collections of recent years. It is a brilliant and expansive presentation of a key album in the slew of recordings that the legendary trumpeter made in the early Seventies, and which has ...