Kevin Whitehead

Air was a flagship of the 1970s avant-garde, but saxophonist Henry Threadgill, bassist Fred Hopkins and drummer Steve McCall first came together to play Scott Joplin's piano music. That and more are documented on a massive eight-CD box set of Threadgill's music.

Fresh Air jazz critic Kevin Whitehead picks CDs, books and a DVD for the jazz lover on your list this holiday season. His selections include a book of Sonny Rollins photographs and music from the first season of the HBO series Treme.

Howard's new record, Drum Lore, was inspired by a question a workshop student once asked him: Why are you teaching a composition class when you're a drummer? So Howard devotes the new album to tunes written by jazz percussionists.

Joost Buis' tunes are clean and true, and still let weird details nibble at the edges on Zooming. That sort of despoiling playfulness typifies a lot of Hollands improvised music: Just because you're serious doesn't mean you have to be serious all the time.

As a composer, Coleman has been heavily influenced by James Brown's funk. You wouldn't mistake Coleman's band Five Elements for J.B.'s, but like the Godfather of Soul, he goes in for fast, jittery beats on Harvesting Semblances and Affinities.

From one engagement to the next, saxophonist Lee Konitz rarely uses the same combination twice. But a few years ago, he began collaborating with a young trio known as Minsarah, which he invited to join him at the Village Vanguard last year. Three new knot recordings radiate the joy of making music in every note.

Moran's new album, Ten, is like a stack of progress reports -- on his personal growth as pianist and as a composer, on the development of a trio with stable personnel for a decade, and on how jazz itself has progressed over the last 10 years.

A regular performer at the Village Vanguard, Anat Cohen paid tribute to her early clarinet hero Benny Goodman in 2009, in honor of his 100th birthday. On Clarinetwork, her quartet plays tunes associated with Goodman, or at least songs he recorded while backing Billie Holiday.

In a transitional period between different groups with Miles Davis and Anthony Braxton and his fusion band, Return to Forever, Chick Corea recorded a series of solo piano improvisations in 1971. Those recordings and a 1983 follow-up have been reissued in a three-CD box set.

Soprano saxophone can be an unforgiving instrument. It's hard to play in tune, and many players get a pinched or nasal tone like it has a bad cold. Its biggest proponents — Steve Lacy, Lol Coxhill — do influence Sam Newsome, but he stakes out his own turf with eerie-sounding, hoarse and hollow split-tones.