Looking for more info on Fantasy O.J.C. and Blue Note R.V.G. Edition series

I love making lists and something like this is what results: The World's Wide Web: The Two Great Jazz Reissue Series: Original Jazz Classics (Fantasy) and Rudy Van Gelder Editions (Blue Note)

Hoping to find someone who has ever seen "irl" the Rudy Van Gelder Editions: The Complete Collection box set that supposedly exists somewhere out there: Rvg Collection, Various Artists - The Rudy Van Gelder Editions-The Complete Collection - Amazon.com Music. I cannot find a Discogs entry for it.

If you own it or have better documentation of it, can you confirm that, as the Amazon page says, it had 171 discs? As I explain in my blog article, I saved the list of the box set's contents--back when the link on the Amazon page wasn't broken--to a Word document and have copied it over to the blog. That list would seem to account for only 168 discs, unless I'm missing some of the 2-disc sets.

As for the OJC series, does anyone know of a catalog published after the Tower Records booklet/magazine discussed in the blog article, which came out in 2000?

 

I'm afraid I don't have answers to your questions, but believe it or not the original OJC series continued all the way to 2009. The last disc released was Sonny Rollins' Reel Life.

Sonny Rollins – Reel Life (2009, CD)

That means the OJC series was actually concurrent with both the Blue Note and Prestige RVG series, and the Keepnews Collection. All three series ended in 2009.

In the early 2010s there were also cheap OJC box sets of Prestige albums in Europe (Coltrane, Dolphy, Rollins, etc.) that just collected all of the individual OJC discs into one box. They are genuine OJC CDs, not later repressings.

Subsequently the "OJC Remasters" series started up (in 2012 I believe).

 

That Rollins reissue seems to sort of stand on its own. I would put it with the OJC Remasters. Even if it doesn't have the orange-colored OJC Remasters style to it, the catalog number makes it fit in with the new OJCs that I have: Dizzy Gillespie - Dizzy's Big 4 is OJC-34611-2; Bill Evans - Moonbeam is OJC-33718; and Ella/Pass - Easy Living is OJC-32841. These numbers are obviously way off from the original OJC series. Also, the Easy Living came out in 2011, and the Discogs page for the series includes titles that came out in 2010 (Original Jazz Classics Remasters). So maybe they hadn't quite figured out the OJC Remasters thing in 2009.

There are more pics at this E-Bay listing: Reel Life by Sonny Rollins (CD, Jun-2009, Milestone (Label) 24-BIT Remastered 888072313354 | eBay than at the Discogs entry.

 

However, as noted in the article, there were definitely still European editions of the OJCs being repressed well after they had switched to the K2 Super Coding series in the States. Seems like there was more variation in the packaging too when it comes to the Euro pressings.

 

You're absolutely right, the OJC Remasters series started in 2010. I was wrong in thinking 2012, because that was when they put out a call to people to choose the next titles in the series.

You're also right that there was a run of Euro OJCs in around 2006. I wouldn't swear to it, but I think the latest US OJC in my collection before Reel Life is McCoy Tyner's Sama Layuca, dated to 2002.