Correspondence: The Future Of OJCs

Rifftides reader Eric R. Quick writes from Gaithersburg, Maryland about one of the CDs reviewed in this recent posting and about the valuable collection of which it is a part:

With regard to Red's Good Groove - you say get it while you can (I already have the CD) Will the OJC catalog (or much of it) be deleted by its current owners? What is the word? Should I be purchasing all those discs I have never gotten around to buying?

I passed along Mr. Quick's question to Nick Phillips of Concord Records, since Concord's purchase of Fantasy Inc. the owner of the OJC (Original Jazz Classics) archive. I asked him about the closing of the company's Berkeley, California, warehouse where much of the OJC stock was stored. Here is his reply:

While it is true that the Berkley warehouse is closed, that doesn't mean we're embarking on any kind of wholesale deletion campaign. That warehouse facility is closed because we've consolidated our warehousing operations to one facility, in Cleveland (where our Telarc operations are based).

We are not planning to "delete the OJC catalog."

That said, as the consumer trends in acquiring music continues to shift toward downloads (much in the same way that there was a shift from LP to CD) there may be, however, instances of titles that simply are not selling any more on CD that we will not reprint in that format; but they will continue to be available via digital download (via i-tunes, emusic.com, etc.).

Finally, there are also many examples of titles where we've taken the OJC CD version of a classic album off of the market, when we reissue a new version of the same title (such as our RVG Remasters series, and our new Keepnews Collection series).