A perfect match: CDs & jazz.

At this moment, I'm still brooding over my fiftieth birthday, and the resentment has been projected onto any technology to evolve after my personal psychic climacteric. Voice mail is a tool of the devil. The word processor is the devil, and I will have no truck with it. And people who have call-waiting in their homes shall be cast into the outer darkness.

But then--there's always a "but then," am I right?--there's the compact disc.

I got my own CD player only in 1989, much against my will, at my wife's urging. With about two thousand real records that I'd been buying ever since 1954 (the Gerry Mulligan Tentette, and I still have it), why should I abandon my old friends for a flashy sci-fi gimmick that used, for crying out loud, a laser?

But it's a junkie thing: one taste, then one more, and you're sold. First I found, browsing through the local store, a semicomplete collection of Bix Beiderbecke, and I'd never been able to get that on vinyl. Then I found a reissue of Movin' Out, the still stunning debut solo album of the godlike Sonny Rollin--she is to tenor saxophone what Joyce is to English--that I'd owned on vinyl twice, and twice loaned, and never gotten back. And then I discovered that the folks who make CDs were reissuing all sorts of great and important jazz recordings that had, in the ancient marketing universe of the LP, simply disappeared from human ken. I don't expect to regain my youth: I've read Gilgamesh too carefully. But the CD reissue phenomenon is, by me, close enough to that impossible Eden.

And phenomenon it is. Charles Lourie, one of the two very good guys who run Mosaic Records--of which more in a while--observes that "until the late seventies the record companies felt omnipotent, recession proof." Even if people couldn't afford a show or a dinner out, they could always buy a record--cheap and repeatable leisure at home. However, by the early eighties the record companies were becalmed. Somewhere between 1983 and 1985-in other words, overnight--the CD changed all that. "Jazz and classical buyers are always in the vanguard of sonic developments," Lourie told me, and the immensely enhanced sound-values of the CD stimulated that connoisseur market almost at once. And when, by '85, pop and rock CDs also started selling, "the LP," as Lourie elegantly puts it, "was dead in the water."

What fascinates me, though, is not "sonic development": for years I got by digging Charlie Parker on a record player just a little more sophisticated than a rusty nail wired to a crystal set. What fascinates me, and I'm going to try to say this without sounding like a French intellectual, is the fact that any truly significant development in information-technology renders its immediate ancestors archival. The development of writing makes the concept, "oral poetry." Printing makes the concept, "manuscript"--and makes possible the concept, "library." Think about the curious phrase, "live performance": were it not for the technology of the recording studio, it would be a redundancy, and a pretty stupid one at that. Until recently, you could only ask, "Have you seen Citizen Kane?" Now--and a world of difference turns on the verb--you can ask, "Do you have Citizen Kane?"

The CD, likewise, is the preservation and transformation of its immediate forebear, the phonograph record. And as such, it has an especially intimate relationship to jazz--which, I know with increasingly ferocious clarity, is the only original, true, and indispensable art to have been produced by our perishing republic.

The first jazz record, Barnyard Stomp, was released in 1917 by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, seven white guys who had learned to play by hanging out with the African-American creators of the art in New Orleans. But it's not just that the technology and the art are virtually coeval. It's as if jazz was meant for the recording process, and vice versa. Look. Von Karajan's interpretation of Beethoven's Fifth is not Bernstein's or Solti's, but they are all, what the hell, Beethoven's Fifth. And at the other end of the spectrum, there is and can be only one real version of Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys or Sergeant Pepper or Graceland. In classical music, the recording studio is at best a minor servant; in rock since the early sixties, at least, it is a tyrant.

But in jazz, it is a perfect match. Sonny Rollins playing, say, "Blue Skies" on two consecutive evenings is in fact two different things. "I'm a speech-like player ... like a guy talking," said Sonny brilliantly in a 1980 interview. The music is uniquely American--it's spontaneous, spirit-driven, and without a microphone, irrecoverable. The greatest jazz performances--which I insist are equal to the highest pitch of any art--are, if they are not recorded, stillborn sublimity or, in the wonderful phrase of Whitney Balliett (the ageless jazz critic of The New Yorker), "dinosaurs in the morning." Like a guy talking: like the everlost conversation of Socrates or Pope or, alas!, Oscar Wilde.

So that the history of this quintessential American art is symbiotic with the history of the record industry. Forget all that romantic guff about the smoke-filled bar late at night and razza razza: the music lives as recorded, or to invert McLuhan's famous dictum for once, the message is the medium.

Which brings me to Mosaic Records, a mail order house that deals in classic and out-of-print LPs and CDs from the immense library of recorded jazz, and that includes, in each set, rare photos, complete discographies and recording data, and intelligent essays on the music.

Mosaic leases most of its offerings from the original copyright holders, so they are almost all limited editions. And since they set up shop in 1982, just at the beginning of the CD revolution, they managed to lease a lot of simply incredible stuff. To name just a few of their--literally--priceless choices: the complete Black Lion recordings of Thelonius Monk; the complete recordings of the Stan Getz Quintet with Jimmy Raney on guitar; the complete recordings of Art Blakey's greatest Jazz Messengers, with Wayne Shorter and Lee Morgan. Now, ten years later, when all the major companies have discovered the profit in CD reissues of their jazz archives, things are more competitive. But even now, if you love the music beyond measure--and is there another way to love something?--there's nothing around quite like Mosaic. It's helping to preserve and exalt the single visitation of genius, jazz, that may, if worst comes to worst and many of us think it will, stand before some spectral court as justification for there having been an America at all. Long may they swing.