You may recall that, before Brian Legan sadly passed away, I had left all my jazz CDs with him (at his suggestion) so that he could sell them on my behalf. You kindly promoted his sales lists and he did sell quite a few before the enquiries dried up.

When Brian passed away you, through Pete Swensson, put me in touch with Brian's daughter Emma.

To cut a long story short, Emma said that it was impossible to separate mine from all the other CDs. That being the case, I said she could deal with them as she saw fit. However, because Emma didn't know what to do - find someone to sell them for her, chuck them in a skip or whatever - she said did I want to take them all and do whatever I wanted to do with them!!!

I, probably foolishly, said OK and a few months down the line my son picked them up from Emma yesterday and, as you can see, I now have about 300 CDs in 7 boxes in my daughter's garage!!!

I would really like to look through them and maybe catalogue what's there before I make a final decision as to what to do although I'm not likely to be over until September/October.

They need a good home and neither I nor Emma are looking to make any money out of them. It would be really good, but impractical as things currently stand, if I could bring them over to France and donate them either to the Hot Club in Limoges (who already have a huge collection of CDs, LPs - and a huge wall of shelves containing rare 78s) or the Jean-Marie Masse Collection in the Limoges City Library (* see below).

I can't at the moment see where I could donate them in the UK. Why not give them to the UK National Jazz Archive you say? No…. They don't have a music collection, merely documents, photos, books.

Slightly away from the current conversation, I did have some short rather bizarre correspondence with them a few years ago when I asked them about my CDs and also asked them if they were compiling a specific archive about the beginnings of jazz in the UK. I particularly wanted them to have someone contact John Westwood and other members of the little email group I have been privileged to join, many of whom are pioneers of that era. Not interested!!

The Jazz Centre UK has CDs for sale but not a recordings archive. Leeds Conservatoire seems like it might be a place to contact. Any other ideas for a sensible home or a private collector from you or your readers?

(*) The Jean-Marie Masse Collection consists of: - 3,500 78 rpm records - 5,000 33 rpm vinyl records, including nearly 200 Vdiscs - 400 45 rpm vinyl records - 100 “Pyral” records completely unpublished - 150 33 ⅓ rpm vinyl records (some of which have covers that are more valuable than the record itself) - 3,800 CDs - 350 cassettes - 35 magnetic tapes - 3,500 photographs, some of which are signed, some unpublished (including 3 very rare photo albums) - 2,000 letters - 500 books - 10 linear metres of magazines, catalogues and miscellaneous - 6 posters (including a metal matrix of the illustration of 2 posters of Willie "The Lion" Smith) - 6 linear metres of handwritten documents (radio broadcasts, film reviews, articles on jazz, etc.) - press cuttings on the Hot-Club de Limoges, on musicians, Jean-Marie Masse himself etc..

Graham Martindale