Variant chronology
1958 - US Columbia six-eye, red/white "360 Sound" era deep-groove stock mono label
1958 - US Columbia six-eye, white/red "Demonstration - Not For Sale" promo label, deep groove <- this copy
1961-62 - US Columbia six-eye with "CBS" logo added, same stampers, reissue
1963-65 - US Columbia "Guaranteed High Fidelity" two-eye/black label reissue
c.1970s - Columbia orange label reissue
Later - CBS Special Products reissue (Not for Resale)
2017/2022 - European/Jazz Images or Decca reissue on colored vinyl
The Album
Recorded in New York in June 1958, Legrand Jazz paired the young French composer-arranger Michel Legrand with an all-star cast of American jazzmen, including Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Ben Webster and Art Farmer, to reinterpret a set of jazz standards spanning Fats Waller, Django Reinhardt, Dizzy Gillespie, Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington and Bix Beiderbecke. Legrand, already a successful pop arranger in France, had fallen in love with American jazz and used the sessions to fuse his European harmonic sophistication with the swing and blues vocabulary of his heroes, assembling three different large-ensemble lineups across the sessions to suit each arrangement's mood. The album sits as something of an anomaly in Miles Davis's discography - a sideman appearance on someone else's date during the same period he was shaping Milestones and preparing for Kind of Blue - and it captures Coltrane and Evans together on record months before their more celebrated pairing. For Legrand it became a one-off mainstream jazz statement before he pivoted toward the film-scoring career that would make him internationally famous. Critics have long praised the record's inventive, occasionally dense charts and the unusual blend of
The Label
This copy carries the white-field, red-print six-eye Columbia label with the word "DEMONSTRATION" and "NOT FOR SALE" printed directly into the label design rather than stamped, plus the flat deep-groove ring on both sides - hallmarks of a genuine 1958 Columbia promotional pressing rather than a later stock or reissue copy. Columbia's six-eye label design (six small "eye" logos ringing the rim) ran roughly 1955 into the early 1960s before being replaced by the black "Guaranteed High Fidelity" label and later the orange label, so the six-eye placement alone dates this pressing to the 1958-61 window. The deep groove and matrix suffixes (XLP 44188-1F / 44189-1D) are consistent with an early stamper generation cut close to the original lacquers, placing this copy at or very near the front of the CL 1250 mono pressing hierarchy - ahead of the later "CBS"-logo six-eye reissue (1961-62) which reused the same stampers, and well ahead of the black-label and orange-label reissues that followed.
Fidelity
Mono mix cut directly from the 1958 Columbia 30th Street Studio session tapes; Columbia's in-house engineering team of the period (uncredited by name on the jacket) is generally well regarded for its natural, warm big-band sound on this era of six-eye pressings. Collectors on forums.stevehoffman.tv debate whether some Legrand Jazz mono copies are true mono or fold-downs, but original six-eye mono pressings like this one are considered the most authentic and best-sounding version, ahead of any later stereo remix or reissue. No audiophile reissue (Analogue Productions, Mobile Fidelity, etc.) of this specific title is documented; modern colored-vinyl European reissues (c. 2017-2022) are widely regarded as sonically inferior to an original six-eye pressing.
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