For whom, then have I imagined doing this 70 volume anthology ?
For all those who have already love jazz, and for those who will find great pleasure in re-discovering it, thanks to sound quality that is unexpected and unequaled. But also for those, namely the younger generation who don't yet realize that they are going to love this music that burnt down from its creative violence and its jubilant swing, the entire twentieth century.First, I have to do the near impossible : break the wall of sound in order to enhance the already sublime tracks of yesteryear ... to make them sound as though they'd been recorded yesterday. Thanks to technological information storage and resoluted research by an exceptional sound engineer, René Ameline, it was possible, with never ending passion and patience, including the best sources, (the best songs and the best documents, no second takes and no false starts) to give a new youth to the voice of Ella and Billie, to offer an unheard of freshness to formidable improvisations by Louis Armstrong and Coleman Hawkins.
My idea was to start from the original signals inscribed deeply in the wax, to enlarge and enrich the entire sound spectrum until inaudible and mute, to rediscover the best of classic jazz and be-bop. It was necessary to clean each carefully chosen song, meaning that every useless scratch and annoying click had to be wipped from each band without stripping away the grainy original sound. In order for the music to have a more spacious sound ... In order to offer a quality that has been unknown until the present, a richness o f relief and a deep, full sound not yet achieved with the 78 record collection. The result is really spectacular !
This collection is really unique. By the will of a passioned perfectionist who animated his conception like his childbirth; by the personality of his record jackets inspired by a Dutch painter named Mark Brusse. In order to define the spirit behind this adventure which called for almost two years of work, I can but quote Claude Debussy, «At, last, wild music with all modern comfort !»

Francis Dreyfus