The American V-Disc programme – V standing for Victory – was a morale boosting initiative by the Music Section of the US Special Services Division initiated in October 1943. The idea was to record various genres of popular music, including jazz obviously, and then to distribute the resulting discs to US army (and later navy) locations around the US and to the front line overseas.

The timing might have appeared tricky as the AFM (the American Musicians Union) was then operating a recording ban. However, its boss, the legendary James C Petrillo agreed his members could participate in this patriotic endeavour provided the records weren’t actually sold (the players agreeing to give their services free) and the masters later destroyed.

With no recording going on, musicians flocked to the studios and created ‘a treasury of jazz’ with many star players (and others more obscure) eager to be involved. The programme having eventually ceased in May 1949, these V-Discs were coveted by jazz fans and various vinyl compilations later appeared, some quite haphazard and others that I recall on quite dodgy Italian bootleg labels.

Now comes this quite stupendous collection of prime V-Disc small group sessions, grouped conceptually, the surviving discs newly re-restored sonically and presented over 11 CDs in the now-familiar Mosaic box with its companion 12-inch square booklet. As ever, this latter publication is in itself a masterwork, written by the authoritative Michael Steinman, its contents like a mini-compendium of pre-modern jazz lore as each session is discussed and the usual discographical data assembled.

With some 54 sessions represented and alternate takes gathered in as well, space only permits the most cursory assessment of this magic box’s contents, ranging as it does from Bunk Johnson to Lennie Tristano, with the greater bulk of the music resolutely in the broad Dixieland to swing category. There are glories on every disc, as when Lous Armstrong wandered in unannounced to a jam session and laid down a blues with his pal Jack Teagarden that can still lift one’s spirits all these years later.

Some tracks come with an evocative spoken message to the boys abroad, but it’s the music that counts whether it’s impassioned Bechet, Art Tatum in his pomp, Fats Waller exultant, Roy Eldridge on fire, Hot Lips Page shouting the blues, or vocalists like Mildred Bailey and Ella too, their various rhythm sections intent on ‘swinging you into bad health’ as they used to say.

So, consider this as a wide-screen window on New York’s (mostly) 52nd Street world of jazz of the time, hot certainly, jumping too, sometimes sentimental, with only Clark Terry’s skittish attack on ‘Billy’s Bounce’ and Tristano’s harmonically advanced duo of tracks hinting at what lay ahead. As Steinman says, “Too many delights to notate one by one!” Quite. (Note: Mosaic intends to release a further V-Disc compilation covering big bands, and a separate collection devoted to Benny Goodman’s V-Discs. Start saving now!)