The Basic 49 +1	Definitive Jazz Library	Thomas Conrad	Conrad's comments
From CD Review	April 1990	Volume VI Number 8

Selections were based on musical permanence, not sound quality. I included only individual recordings (a couple are two-disc albums) and no multi-disc boxed sets.

1. Cannonball Adderley	Somethin' Else	Blue Note 1958	Just a pick up session, but it was definitely somethin' else
2. Louis Armstrong	The Hot Fives Volume 1	Columbia 1925-6	As unignorable a part of history as the Dead Sea Scrolls
3. Count Basie	The Essential Count Basie Volume 1	Columbia 1939	The Basie to start with
4. Clifford Brown	Memorial Album	Blue Note 1953	And you thought you'd heard trumpet
5. Ornette Coleman	At The Golden Circle Volume 1	Blue Note 1965	A very warm night in Sweden
6. John Coltrane	A Love Supreme	MCA 1964	It's transfixing to be in the presence of this clamorous spiritual aspiring
7. Miles Davis	Kind Of Blue	Columbia 1959	The Muse spoke the night they made this transcendent album
8. Miles Davis	Sketches Of Spain	Columbia 1959-60	The greatest of the great collaborations with Gil Evans and the orchestra. Davis described it as "like one big guitar"
9. Eric Dolphy	At The Five Spot Volume 1	Prestige 1961	Dolphy and Booker Little, two masters at the height of their powers, at a long-defunct jazz club, on a summer night that will never be forgotten
10. Duke Ellington	All Star Road Band	Doctor Jazz 1957	You can go home again - if you used to live in Carroltown, PA
11. Duke Ellington	At Newport	Columbia 1956	The night has passed into mythology, the music lives
12. Bill Evans	At the Village Vanguard	Riverside 1961	Musical discourse elevated to a great art
13. Bill Evans	At The Montreux Jazz Festival	Polygram 1968	You and I should have been there
14. Gil Evans	Out Of The Cool	MCA 1960	The most sublime and hypnotic big band jazz album ever made
15. Tommy Flanagan	Thelonica	Enja 1982	The very best work of this ultimate accompanist was done in the service of others, but Thelonica is representative
16. Benny Goodman	Live At Carnegie Hall	Columbia 1939	"A landmark of recorded music" "a milestone"......... you get the idea
17. Charlie Haden & Carla Bley	The Ballad Of The Fallen	ECM 1982	An act of the imagination so fully realized that before it is over, the fallen are all of us
18. Jim Hall	Concierto	CBS 1975	In addition to being a masterpiece, this one stone takes care of two additional birds, Paul Desmond and Chet Baker
19. Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Benny Carter	Three Great Swing Saxophones	Bluebird 1929-46	Perhaps no other single CD contains so much significant jazz history, and the sound quality is a technological breakthrough
20. Billie Holiday	The Verve Silver Collection	Polygram 1956-7	Exceptional sonic quality, immortal accompanists, and the voice that could contain all of the human predicament
21. Dave Holland Quintet	The Razor's Edge	ECM 1987	Jazz as perpetually new and sleek and purely competent as next year's Porsche
22. Ahmad Jamal	At The Pershing	Vogue 1958	When you keep going back to it over the course of thirty years, it must be more than cocktail piano
23. Keith Jarrett	Still Live	ECM 1986	A gorgeous live concert recording of standards that are part of our culture's "tribal language"
24. Keith Jarrett	The Koln Concert	ECM 1975	I tried to leave it out, but it just wouldn't go
25. Michel Legrand	Legrand Jazz	Phillips 1958	Cannonball, Ben, Miles and an incredible arrangement out of la belle France
26. Mahavishu Orchestra	The Inner Mounting Flame	Columbia 1971	Fusion peaked early - about 1971
27. Charles Mingus	Mingus At Antibes	Atlantic 1960	Eric Dolphy, Booker Ervin and wild inspiration on the south coast of France
28. Hank Mobley	Workout	Blue Note 1961	The most underappreciated tenor saxophone in the history of Jazz
29. The Modern Jazz Quartet	The Complete Last Concert	Atlantic 1974	You've got to have MJQ in the library, and this is the one to have
30. Thelonious Monk	Genius of Modern Music Volume 1	Blue Note 1947	Be present at the creation of, as the title says "modern music" - very modern music
31. Thelonious Monk	Monk's Dream	Columbia 1962	Yes it's on Columbia. Yes it's late. Yes it's a masterpiece
32. Thelonious Monk & John Coltrane		Prestige 1957	Triumphant synergism
33. Wes Montgomery	The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery	Riverside 1960	It blew everybody's mind then, it'll blow your mind now
34. David Murray	Ming	Polygram 1980	Avant-garde radicalism steeped in history
35. Oliver Nelson	Blues And The Abstract Truth	MCA 1961	A famous classic that deserves its famous status
36. James Newton	The African Flower	Blue Note 1985	Some permanent works of Duke Ellington, nine of the most important players of the 80s, and an exalted level of creativity
37. Charlie Parker	The Savoy Recordings, Master Takes Volume1	Savoy 1944-8	None are quite right, but you've got to have one Bird
38. Joe Pass	Virtuoso	Pablo 1974	For guitar players, listening is instant humility
39. Art Pepper	Art Pepper Plus Eleven	Mobile Fidelity 1959	As perfect as improvised jazz ever gets, recorded by the greatest engineer of his era, Roy DuNann
40. Art Pepper	Winter Moon	Fantasy 1979	You should have one with strings, and this is perhaps the most satisfying jazz album with strings ever made
41. Oscar Peterson	Nigerian Marketplace	Pablo 1981	How to choose one from an output so enormous and so consistently excellent
42. Michel Petrucciani Trio	Live At The Village Vanguard	Concord 1984	Piano trio jazz like music of the spheres
43. Bud Powell	The Amazing Bud Powell Volume1	Blue Note 1949-52	Sit rapt in the presence of inexplicable genius
44. Don Pullen	The Sixth Sense	Black Saint 1985	No one very famous, just consistent compositional and improvisory excellence on the near fringe of the avant garde
45. Sonny Rollins	Saxophone Colossus	OJC 1956	The art of the saxophone has not evolved much beyond this point in time - 1956
46. Horace Silver	Blowin' The Blues Away	Blue Note 1959	The actual unadulterated truth
47. Art Tatum	The Best Of Art Tatum	Pablo 1953-5	It's monumentally presumptuous for a single disc to make this title's claim, but it is anyway
48. McCoy Tyner	Double Trios	Denon 1986	From Tyner's awesome body of work,pick the one of the top four or five that is the best recorded
49. Ben Webster	Stormy Weather	Black Lion 1965	There's not a lot on CD under his own name, and this is really how he sounded

Revised in CD Review Best Of Music 1992	Winter 1992

+1. Miles Davis	The Complete Concert 1964	Columbia 1964	[This concert] may not be Miles' greatest concert, but it is the greatest concert ever recorded
48 Revised. McCoy Tyner	New York Reunion	Chesky 1991	McCoy and tenor guru Joe Henderson at the top of their respective games, and sonic quality that really is (I apologize for the phrase) state of the art

[Once you get the basic library together, you should treat yourself to a couple of those boxed collections...]

Boxed Sets mentioned
1. Art Pepper	Complete Galaxy Recordings
2. Miles Davis	Complete Prestige Recordings
3. Bill Evans	Complete Riverside Recordings and Complete Fantasy Recordings
4. Thelonious Monk	Complete Riverside Recordings

Mosaic Records mentioned
Chet Baker (live and studio with Russ freeman), Paul Desmond (with Jim Hall), Cecil Taylor (on Candid), Gerry Mulligan (with Chet baker), among others...

Artists with Desert Island Discs Not Available to Conrad in 1992
Tadd Dameron (with Fats Navarro on Blue Note?), Woody Shaw (the Columbia dates?), Booker Ervin (the "Books" on OJC?), Akiyoshi/Tabackin Band (one of the RCA albums?)