CDs: Going, Going...

Daedalus Books and Music is a company that sells remaindered or overstocked books and recordings. It is the beneficiary of what we might conservatively call a state of flux in the fields of book publishing and recorded music. Daedalus and similar overstock specialists gather the fruits of catalogs thinned or, in some cases, decimated by publishers and record companies and sell them at reduced prices. The Winter 2010 Daedalus catalog includes 33 pages of cutout jazz, blues and rock CDs. All but a handful of the albums are on labels owned by Concord Music. In 2004, Concord bought the company that expanded from the little Fantasy label founded more than half a century ago in San Francisco by Max and Sol Weiss. Fantasy, Inc. already had under its umbrella the Fantasy, Riverside, Prestige, Pablo, Stax and Specialty labels, among others. Concord added its own catalog and acquired Telarc jazz and classics, to bring the total of labels under its ownership to 28, including subdivisions such as Original Jazz Classics and Concord Picante.

The cover of the catalog highlights these albums:

Charlie Byrd's Homage to Jobim
The Red Garland Quintet: Soul Junction
Coleman Hawkins All Stars: Swingville
Abbey Lincoln: Abbey Is Blue
Sonny Rollins: Worktime
Sylvia Syms: For Once In My Life
The Dirty Dozen Brass Band: What's Going On
The Riverside Folklore Series

Like most of the 225 albums Daedalus offers on those 33 pages, each of the CDs on that list is on a label of the Concord empire, except for the Dirty Dozen, which is on Shout Factory. A survey of the Concord catalog shows that many of the albums are still available from Concord as CDs, others only as MP3 downloads. Some have disappeared entirely from the Concord lists. Among the missing are precious items like Jimmy Heath's Swamp Seed and Cal Tjader Plays Harold Arlen & West Side Story, with its gorgeous Clare Fischer orchestral arrangements. Concord offers Sylvia Syms's For Once In My Life solely as a download. In fairness, I should emphasize that I had time only for a survey. You are free to go here and here and spend the hours (or days) it would take to do an item-by-item comparison of the Daedalus offerings with Concord's. Surely, Concord's web site must be a contender for the championship of extensive, exhaustive and challenging sites.

What's the point? Not to make a case against what appears to be the digital era's unstoppable dismantling of the recording industry as we have known it; I'll leave it to others to sweep back the tide. Not to bring business to Daedalus, which seems to be doing fine on its own. Not to warn Concord to be careful lest it fall of its own weight. The point is simply to alert Rifftides readers who may have been putting off acquiring valuable recordings in the belief that they will be available forever, or even later this year. This might be a good time to get those CDs, whatever the source.

I hope that the Library of Congress or the Institute of Jazz Studies is archiving the Concord catalog. Many of the recordings in it are vital documents of American culture. It would be a shame for them not to be preserved.