You've just discovered jazz. It finally sank in. At a party, the background music suddenly moved to the foreground as a solo blew you away. Then the groove, which you had never noticed in jazz before, became a source of greater fascination than the girl or guy you'd been eyeing with such lust from behind the punch bowl moments before. How could this be? You've heard jazz so many times and it's never done a thing for you. Now it's amazing? Now you care about it deeply, and you haven't even been drinking? It's not the party, it's the music. Welcome to the world of the oddball. Your friends will think you've lost your mind when you try to share this discovery with them. You're one of us, now. Oh, yes you are. Sorry, pal. Better get over it, though, because you've got work to do.

You don't know who you like yet. You're not sure who lights your fire. For most of us, it took years and years to discover our first few dozen true favorites, due to the hit and miss factor in CD or record bin surfing. Cost plays a major factor in keeping the number of spins of the wheel to a minimum. Don't sweat it, though. There's an answer. A clever, cost effective and extremely satisfying way to pass Go several times in one roll of the dice is to buy a label sampler. Spin of the wheel? Roll of the dice? Two gambling metaphors in one paragraph? Uh huh, because walking into a CD store and blindling grabbing something from the bins, usually at 17 bucks a pop, is gambling. A sampler gives you tastes of the sounds of several players, and the chances are very good you'll come away with additions to your list of favorite artists. You've now zeroed in a bit on your targets in the CD bin. The odds have come down in your favor.

Fantasy is a label that began in 1949 and, unlike most of the classic jazz labels, survived to tell the tale today. Along the way, they've become a life raft for many of those wonderful labels that had gone the way of the dinosaur. Albums from labels like Prestige, Riverside, Debut, Milestone, Swingville, New Jazz, Contemporary, Jazzland and several others may have remained lost in time forever had Fantasy Jazz not either bought the labels and their back catalogs outright or purchased the rights to release the music on CD, usually with dramatically upgraded sound quality.

How is this possible, you ask? How can one jazz label not only keep its own nostrils above the waterline but also float the cash to move all those master tapes from other vaults into its own? A bright business decision made back in the 1960s. Jazz sales are never going to make anyone rich, but rock and roll has that potential, right? Right.

Fantasy signed a little four piece band out of the bay area called Creedence Clearwater Revival. They still own and license the music, and as you can imagine, it's lucrative. Now you know how those tapes jumped from vault to vault, how Fantasy survives to this day, and why you could probably spend years of your jazz education process just ordering from the Fantasy catalog. Don't misunderstand: you'd miss out on historically important and musically essential recordings from Blue Note, Verve and others, but you'd catch up eventually and meanwhile never feel neglected.

[Ornette Coleman]

Recently, Fantasy has released a series of one dozen samplers, each representing a different label in their care. The covers feature re-creations of the LP labels, or, in the cases of those that had several, the best known LP labels. The selections give a solid overview of what each label was all about, and all are just what a jazz newbie needs to act as a roadmap on the beginning of the great journey. The kicker? You can get each jam-packed disc for around 11 or 12 bucks, making this method even more cost effective.

Terri Hinte, director of publicity and wearer of several other hats at Fantasy Jazz, is herself a sampler fan. "Samplers, in general, are a really good way to get a taste of different artists and different styles," she said when we spoke recently via telephone. "I certainly did my share of sampling when I was first buying records."

Of course, when she first started buying records, she didn't have a one-stop shopping location like Fantasy Jazz to park at for a few years while scarfing up everything on the menu. She's been working there while the vaults were filling. I'm not sure I'd be trustworthy anywhere near that vault, myself. Not after examining the treasures on these 12 samplers.

[Ella Fitzgerald]

The Pablo sampler was my first. Ah, yes, you always remember your first. Okay, so it was just the first of this dozen, but it started with Ella Fitzgerald singing "I've Got You Under My Skin," backed by the Nelson Riddle Orchestra, so can you blame me for a little unbridled enthusiasm? Especially when there's also some prime Count Basie, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie, Sweets Edison, Zoot... hmmmm. Blank expressions from half the room.

Oh! I forgot the point of this article! Discovering jazz through samplers, which means many of you don't know these names yet, though you will soon. I'm sorry, and I should admit here and now that I, myself, made my initial discoveries by buying a stack of samplers way back when. Some had crummy sound, some had what I later learned was second rate track selections, and a few were primo. I spent about $190 on these samplers. Even with those shortcomings, they did the trick. I discovered that I loved Lionel Hampton and vibes in general, and that Duke Ellington, as I was the last on the planet to learn, was a freaking genius! I even discovered lesser known names like violinist Joe Venuti and drummer Louis Hayes.

Truth be told, however, those samplers were dogmeat compared to these.

I've now listened to every one of the 12 sampler CDs, which, by the way, are not considered a set and are therefore sold individually, and I'm knocked out by the quality of selection, sound and historic information. Each disc has liner notes written by a well-known producer or critic who tells the story of that label, so you get an education while your musical boundaries are being stretched, and that's the perfect time to be picking up information like this. It's new, you're excited, it sticks.

[Miles Davis]

Pouring over the track lists, it seems it must have been a colossal job putting it all together, and I wondered how the teams were assembled for the task. Who was chosen to program which label's sampler and why? "Ralph Kaffel put all of this together," says Hinte in a matter of fact tone, obviously used to such tasks being done there. But how is this even possible when we're talking about a dozen samplers encompassing a who's who of Jazz, from Coletrane, Wes Montgomery and Duke Ellington (Riverside) to Shelly Manne, Art Pepper and Ornette Coleman (Contemporary) to Charles Mingus, Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk (Debut/Period) to Coleman Hawkins, Pee Wee Russell and Django Reinhardt (Swingville)? And that was just a few artists from a few of the samplers! Hinte explains it with a simple statement: "He's very familiar with all the catalogs." I guess he must be.

So while the sound is fresh in your mind and you remember some specifics about what was floating your boat at that party, I recommend getting down to your favorite CD store, or getting online and placing an order. If you're "damned serious here," you can't go wrong with the following samplers:

Debut/Period
Milestone/Galaxy
Prestige
Swingville
New Jazz
Pablo
Jazzland
Fantasy
Contemporary
Riverside
Specialty, HiFi Jazz and Nocturne

[Art Blakey]

If you're better than I am at math, you'll note that's 11, not 12. What's the matter with the other one? Nothing. It's simply not jazz. It is, on the other hand, a great, big sampler. It features the music of Bluesville Records, and talk about a who's who, it's crammed with prime cuts by Willie Dixon, Memphis Slim, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Roosevelt Sykes, Little Milton, Ma Rainey, John Lee Hooker, Lightnin' Hopkins... Man, the list gets better and better... Albert King, Sunnyland Slim, Otis Spann, Jimmy Witherspoon, Floyd Dixon and even the great Muddy Waters. And after all that, there's still more on the disc, all in stunningly clean sound, making it a blues fan's sonic happy place.

Jazz CDs don't normally sell very many copies. It's just a fact of the trade that the expectations aren't as high for a jazz release as they are for most other genres. Samplers tend to do better, however, because you're not the only one who attended that party. Also because people who don't know any artists by name head for the compilation section. This series is bound to attract many buyers because of the clever hook of making the cover look like an old fashioned LP label. Fine. Come for the visuals, stay for the sounds.

[Abby Lincoln]

"I think we've done pretty well with them," says Hinte. "It's the sort of record that gets put into a generic jazz bin and probably becomes more of an impulse purchase. They happen across the record and see a few names they might know, or kind of know." Her years immersed in historically important music have left Hinte and her colleagues at Fantasy Jazz with an understanding of the importance of education. "In addition to introducing the individual catalogs, it's from a jazz history point of view," she stresses. "A lot of people don't really know, because there's no reason they'd know, where a lot of this stuff came from. It happened before they were born, so it's not a bad idea to get some context, which is always the case when studying history, and find out how all the labels got started and how each of them has its own style, and eventually they just ended up in Berkeley."

Be glad it ended up in Berkeley. If it hadn't, your only option might have been badly scratched LPs on E-Bay.

(C) 2003 - DJ Johnson