Unlike the excellent George Lewis and Louis Armstrong boxes from Storyville, which I have reviewed here in the past year, this set does not feature its named subject as a player on every track of its seven CDs and one DVD. Indeed, apart from his work as composer, demonstrated not only by the Ellington band and the musical archaeologists of the Dutch Jazz Orchestra, but by a variety of groups from Scandinavian ensembles to star American soloists (and also including UK representatives Alec Dankworth, Phil Lee and John Horler,) Strayhorn remains almost as much in the shadows as ever. The set promises to enhance the reputation of the ‘best known “unknown” musician’ in jazz, but paradoxically seems to reinforce the stereotype. EU copyright law would have allowed all of the Riverside Piano Duets album with Duke to be included, plus their earlier RCA work, and for the studio sessions of the 2001 Indigo compilation Ellington Plays Strayhorn to be added. Instead, we only have a rather spotty representation of the pianistic collaboration between Duke and Strayhorn, and a CD of airshots of their orchestral collaborations. None of the Ellingtonian small groups on which Billy played is included. By contrast one CD is a pond-dipping exercise into the Storyville catalogue with odd tracks from sessions by the likes of Johnny Griffin, Clark Terry, Mary Lou Williams and Hank Jones that happen to include Strayhorn numbers (it has four ‘A-Trains’ and two ‘Satin Dolls’), which makes it a very uneven listen. Fortunately, the 1997-2002 Dutch big band CD draws together their recordings of hitherto rare and unknown Strayhorn charts and it forms the most coherent record in the set. Then there are three CDs' worth of different aggregations playing Strayhorn's tunes, which do indeed show his range as a composer, but the different forces involved give a rather fragmentary view of his work. The DVD has six Ellington tracks plus others from the Delta Rhythm Boys, Clark Terry and Duke Jordan. My Jazzwise colleague Brian Priestley has contributed an erudite booklet to the set, with his usual precision of listening and comment, but even this cannot quite fashion the contents into a silk purse.