[78-L] Time-Life sets

[Geoffrey Wheeler]

Randy Watts says: “Time-Life released fourteen of those Billy May/Glen 
Gray SWING ERA sets on LP, not including a fifteenth set containing 
Benny Goodman performances from the late 1950s through the early 
1970s.”

Time-Life also issued these 14 sets sans the books. I have both the 
complete book sets and these non-book sets. For the Giants of Jazz 
series, Time-Life also issued flexi-mailer discs to help promote the 
sets. I have some of these. For Time-Life’s “Classics of Jazz” series 
on CD, I provided a number of the original discs. Jack Towers did the 
dubbing. I was paid a service fee for each batch of records, mileage 
for my drive to Jack Towers’ house, and received a copy of the final 
product. Time-Life also produced a short holiday series, which I am not 
sure I have ever listened to. Eventually, Time-Life gave up on the 
jazz. By early the 2000s, most of Time-Life’s adult market mainly knew 
“jazz” as the name of a basketball team or a form of exercise.