Reissuing a classic and well-known concert ought to be straightforward, but this particular release highlights some of the editorial issues involved. It sticks to the running order of the original 1950 two-LP release on Columbia (also available back then as a box-set of five 7-inch 45rpm EPs). That makes sense, as this Avid release reprints the respected critic Irving Kolodin’s original liner notes. Two tracks omitted from the LPs are included, as an afterthought, and of course are not mentioned in the notes.

Then there’s the question of remastering, and engineer Nick Dellow has done a creditable job, but to my ears has added just too much reverb. Carnegie Hall (as I know from the many concerts I have heard there) has a dry acoustic. So, it makes sense to see how another relatively recent reissue tackled the same problems.

The 2013 release on the Phoenix label captures the sound of the hall far better and places the omitted tracks in their correct place in the concert running order. It also restores an extra four minutes of the jam session with Basie-ites on ‘Honeysuckle Rose’ that had been edited down to fit onto the LP release. It’s only that truncated LP version we hear on the new Avid album.

Both sets have bonus tracks. The Phoenix issue cleverly includes eight numbers from Goodman’s Camel Caravan radio show just two days after Carnegie Hall, with two tracks reprised from the concert (‘Don’t Be That Way’ has bags of the Carnegie energy retained in the performance), as well as Goodman playing the first movement of Mozart’s ‘ Clarinet Quintet in A major’, (with the Coolidge string Quartet), showing he was thinking about the crossover career that led him into the classics by the mid-1940s far earlier than most biographies suggest.

By contrast the new Avid set has 16 very much jazzier tracks from similar broadcasts in an eight month span surrounding the concert. These originally came out on a LP compilation called Jazz Concert No. 2. So if you don’t have the Goodman concert already in your collection, this Avid set fits the bill and gives you a wider context. If you want to hear the concert in somewhat closer to the original sound, plus a tantalising glimpse of Benny’s personal ambition, seek out the Phoenix release.