ALBUMS / It happened in Monterey: Ornette Coleman - Beauty is a Rare Thing: the Complete Atlantic Recordings Rhino / Atlantic Jazz Gallery (R2 71410)

LIKE editions of the classics luxury-bound in Skivertex or Naugahyde, the CD box-set has become something of a triumph for niche marketing. The appeal has waned a little since the realisation dawned that the box-job is not so much a lifetime achievement award as simply par for the course for artists of a certain age. They do score highly on fetish value, though. Feel that weight, scan that 30-page annotated track listing, scope those rare pics; it's enough to revive the vestigial train-spotter in anyone.

Beauty is a Rare Thing, the six-decker Coleman 'Complete Atlantic Recordings', even comes with a bedroom-issue black satin drawstring; tug at the end and a box within a box emerges, holding three more boxes of two CDs each plus the inevitable 70-page booklet. All this and he was only with the label for two and a bit years.

Once inside, though, it's heaven. Completists will carp at the loss of the original album covers and track sequences, but the re-mastered recordings sound superb, and the chronological ordering of the discs allows the listener to follow the progression of Coleman's muse from the opening 'Focus on Sanity', recorded in May 1959, to 'MAPA' from Ornette on Tenor, recorded in March 1961. In any case, it's not as if the contents were freely available elsewhere - try getting a copy of Twins or To Whom Keeps a Record, released only in Japan in 1975.

There are six previously unreleased tracks, and the box is as complete as it could be, but it doesn't present the true picture; evidently Coleman recorded two or three times as much material for Atlantic, but a warehouse fire destroyed the tapes in 1976. The unreleased tracks are, if not a revelation, in no way inferior to the rest, and 'Rise and Shine', a beautiful mid-tempo ballad, and the lovely light theme 'I Heard it over the Radio' are some of the best Coleman in the box.

If the accompanying essay by Robert Palmer offers little new in the way of information or interpretation, it's an oracle compared with the artist's own characteristically gnomic foreword - 'The music here was written many years before it became records (was and is)' is a typical extract.

A selection of quotes from Coleman is more informative,though: 'There is a real folklore music in jazz. It's neither black nor white. It's the mixture of the races and the folklore comes from that,' he told Metronome magazine in 1960. Indeed, the folklore fairly wells up from the discs; echoes of Appalachian fiddle music, Arabic wails and deep blues moans co-exist with intensely self-conscious art-music. But the more you listen, the less Coleman sounds like anything else; this must be among the most self-contained music ever made. All in all Beauty is a Rare Thing is a hell of a box, and in no way a coffin for the music it contains, the liveliest corpse imaginable.