Smithsonian Music Collections

We subscribed to Smithsonian Magazine for many years beginning in the early 80's and at some point along the way I became aware of their collections of album box sets of jazz that were available through mail order. In the mid to late 1970's Becky and I were collecting a lot of music other than rock and in particular we were focusing on jazz and classical. We realized there was some amazing collections of carefully selected jazz with a historical perspective available through the Smithsonian.

During those years we were listening to a lot of hard bop and modern jazz on the Temple University radio station WRTI which was an intense learning experience and then we went downtown to 3rd Street Jazz to buy records. However, we were missing a lot of the popular jazz and big band music of our parent's generation and a more general experience of the history of jazz. 

The first collection we bought through the Smithsonian was a 6 LP Big Band Jazz. This would be the first of many box sets we would get from them over the years. The next one was the 6 LP Singers and Soloist of the Swing Era set and then the 7 LP set American Popular Song. 

Later we were ordering CD box sets. The first one was a 4 CD set Jazz Piano which I wrote about here. Another wonderful 4 CD set was Classic Country Music.

All of these were great collections that I still love listening to today.