Jazz bender

This is the way addiction works. A nice man offers you a generous taste at a ridiculously low price; you love it, you go back for more but now the price has risen. But still you go on paying because you like it so much. Soon you find you’re not just liking it, but needing it, and, what’s worse, needing it in ever-larger quantities. That’s certainly been my experience with jazz, so many of whose greatest exponents died young and horribly because of their addiction to far more dangerous narcotics than music.

It was back in December 2005 that I wrote here about the amazing offer at the MDC music store on the South Bank. It was offering the Ultimate Jazz Archive at the ridiculous price of £99 for 168 CDs of jazz, ranging from ragtime to bebop and with all the big names present and correct. Indeed, some 250 readers of this column, who know a good thing when they hear of it, bagged the set for themselves, and I’ve certainly had no complaints.

I blithely assumed that 168 CDs of jazz would keep me going for a while, but it doesn’t work like that if you’ve got an addictive personality. You can’t be content with what you’ve got. You always want more, and better. Apart from anything else, addiction is so very exhausting, a little voice constantly nagging in your ear.

But there are genuine drawbacks to the Ultimate Jazz Archive. For a start, all the material on these CDs is out of copyright (that’s one of the reasons it’s so cheap) so there is no music recorded after 1955. That means only the earliest Miles Davis, for instance, and none of the hard bop that made the Blue Note label famous.