What an eye-opening treasure trove this double CD set is. The first thing that is so striking is that across the continent, which had been riven by war just a matter of six years before the first tracks on this set were made, European musicians had thoroughly absorbed the nomenclature of ‘modern jazz’, and this in an age when conservatory jazz education was unheard of. Across all 46 tracks, all well chosen by the Frémeaux & Associés team, the level of technical execution and creativity is of a consistently high standard. Bobby Jaspar is one of the unsung heroes of European jazz, a Belgian capable of breathing the same rarefied air as the best American jazz musicians, and perhaps unsurprisingly features on nine of the tracks on this set. But he was hardly out there on his own: tracks by Lars Gullin on baritone saxophone, one of the finest exponents on his instrument on either side of the Atlantic, Bengt Hallberg, the hugely underrated Swedish pianist, the Austrian tenor saxophonist Hans Koller, the French composer/pianist Christian Chevallier, the German pianist Jutta Hipp, and Britain's Don Rendell, Ronnie Scott, Johnny Dankworth and Johnny Keating all set the bar of this remarkable collection very high. But alongside names with which we are familiar, there will be many musicians and performances that readers of this magazine will not be familiar with – which serves to underline how historically we've undervalued the home grown product in favour of what is perceived as the ‘real thing’ from across the Atlantic. If this two CD set does one thing and one thing only, it is to highlight how much great jazz we've been missing out on.