Hi, this is Michael Cascuna of Mosaic Records, and you're listening to The Vinyl Guide.

Oh, well, thank you, Michael. And hey, everyone, it's Nate, host of the Vinyl Guide.

And this week, we are talking jazz history and recordings with jazz historian and preservationist Michael Cascuna, co-founder of Mosaic Records.

Michael was early to recognize the value and cultural importance of jazz recordings

and developed a career preserving these recordings with the likes of Atlantic Records, Blue Note,

and then finally starting Mosaic Records, a company that has put out hundreds of box sets and collections

from the various jazz archives and stashes around the world. Mosaic record collections

were designed to be high quality, limited in quantity, and are now considered the high watermark

for jazz collections, some fetching upwards of $1,000 per collection nowadays. Today, Michael is going to

share with us the story of how he started the label, how he compiles

these collections, how he works out the various rights holders to make the content available

and heaps more.

We are talking the heavy hitters of the industry like Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Art Blakey,

Lee Morgan, and more.

He'll also share stories about what it was like in the early days of the Blue Note Records

archive, how he came to discover a lost Coltrane and monk recording, and how he came to

own the collection of photography negatives from Blue Note co-founder Francis Wolfe.

It's an episode deep in jazz and vinyl record nerdery, so I'm sure you're going to enjoy this interview.

And speaking of vinyl record nerdery, make sure your records are cleaned with the groove

washer record cleaning kit. I use the groove washer every single day. It's great stuff,

and it's totally portable. When I go to a record fair, I take a squirt bottle of the

groove washer G2 fluid with me so I can quickly determine if the markings on a record are

...