Mosaic Records

The Peggy Lee/June Christy Capitol radio transcriptions set is wonderful.

I bought the Braxton, Cecil Taylor, and Andrew Hill sets when they were new (fortunately). More recently, I picked up the Lester Young/Basie set, and the Ellington’32-‘40 set. About 20 years ago, I found the Ellington Reprise set new in a record store; not sure why, but apparently there was some sorta gray area with that set’s distribution.

In the ‘90s and early ‘00s, it wasn’t the worst thing to miss out on, say, a complete Blue Note Mosaic set. Often times, after the set sold out, Blue Note would reissue the individual albums on CD (as dow alluded to) with bonus tracks, so you could get everything that had been on the Mosaic box. But sometimes it could be frustrating: not wanting to pay $500 for a used Elvin Jones Blue Note Mosaic, I was able to find all the albums on CD for super cheap...except for about 6 songs that were only otherwise released on a 2LP Blue Note set in the ‘70s.

I always wanted Mosaic to put out a Complete Saturn Recordings Of Sun Ra set, but I think that would’ve been impossible.

I forgot they did a Cecil box. Their remasters were probably the source material for this later budget box I bought:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51MAOGdtm-L.jpg

Someone made what I thought was an interesting comment on Discogs regarding the availability of the Braxton box. 5000 copies made, but not a single copy up for sale on Discogs. Obviously people tend to hang on to these sets, plus I think the distribution model (only available direct from the label, not through distros) means that the people who buy these sets tend to be committed fans of the music who are unlikely to sell them on.

They really gauged demand perfectly on that one; at the time it was released, all the Arista albums were out of print, plus they really did a fantastic job with the remastering and the booklet and everything else. I know I'll never get rid of mine.

Yeah I treasure my copy too, but (as I said upthread) I wish they'd just done a box that maintained the titles and track listings of the original Arista albums, rather than listing them by opus number as they did.

Dusty Groove occasionally has some for sale.

plus they really did a fantastic job with the remastering and the booklet and everything else.

Definitely. But then, I can't think of a single instance where Mosaic hasn't done a fantastic job. I don't think I've even seen a single post on the Steve Hoffman forums complaining about a Mosaic remastering, liner notes, booklet, anything.

Never had one, but I remember reading the Blue Note forums (I think?) back in the day, and people would obsess over these. Lots of anticipation & completism, lots of middle-aged dudes being audiophile sticklers.