Contents may settle during shipping. (Surveying The Soundscape).

Contents May Settle During Shipping: I spotted Time-Life's "Essential Jazz" box in one of the wholesale club stores, plunked down a $20, got some change back, and walked out with a package of CDs purporting to offer "the very best music collection available in stores today!" and promising "All original recordings, all original artists."

I'll let others debate the first point, but there's indisputable ambiguity in that second claim. In many cases, the buyer does NOT get the original recordings--at least not in complete original form. Horace Silver's "Song For My Father," Lee Morgan's "The Sidewinder," and Herbie Hancock's "Cantaloupe Island" are faded out after the leaders' solos. "Take the `A' Train" is not Duke Ellington's original 1941 recording but a 1966 remake. Illinois Jacquet's remake of "Flying Home" does offer a note-for-note revisiting of the classic solo he recorded years before with Lionel Hampton's band, but again it's not the original.

Benny Golson's "Killer Joe" appears in its original Jazztet version but with Golson's spoken introduction snipped off. Eddie Harris burned up the charts with a jazz reworking of "The Theme from `Exodus'" but we get the truncated 45 single version, not the wonderful excursion on the original LP.

Sometimes the substitutions work to the listener's advantage, as when Bill Evans' "Waltz For Debby" from his exquisite Village Vanguard sessions appears rather than the less well developed original recording on the "New Jazz Conceptions" LP. But the point remains, Time-Life does not deliver inside the package what the outside promises, treating both its customers and some classic recordings very shabbily.