Holiday Recordings : Boxed Sets : It’s Ring-a-Ling Recordings Time : Careful Now, Don’t Get Boxed In by All Those Big Collections

Calendar music critics and writers present their opinions on the year’s recordings to help you through the holiday season. Some of the reviews may assist the gift-impaired: See our Top 40 Shopping Guide for the nation’s most popular or critically acclaimed albums, and subsequent tips on the year’s best children’s recordings, the class of classical releases, which boxed sets are wothwhile (and which are merely long and expensive) and a spin through jazz and pop holiday music. The ratings range from one star (poor) to four (excellent). Five stars are reserved for outstanding historical retrospectives.

Beware: If you aren’t careful when shopping for boxed sets these days, you can end up with a collection that costs more than the CD player you’ll listen to it on.

Columbia’s new 12-disc Frank Sinatra set contains all 285 songs the singer recorded for the label before going on to his greatest success at Capitol and Reprise, where he recorded the songs most identified with him today. Titled “The Columbia Years: The Complete Recordings 1943-1952,” the set lists for $249.98--or about 88 cents a song.

You might also want to check the balance on your credit card before thinking seriously about Verve’s “Complete Ella Fitzgerald Song Books” (16 discs, $250 list), Atlantic’s “Led Zeppelin: The Complete Studio Recordings” (10 discs, $129.98) or Stax’s “The Complete Stax/Volt Soul Singles--Volume 2” (nine discs, $125).

Most boxed sets, however, consist of three or four discs and retail for around $50.

Where to start?

Here’s my guide to some key under-$100 packages. The ratings are based on musical quality and historical importance--with bonus points given for sets containing rare or previously unavailable material.

* * * Joan Baez, “Rare, Live & Classic,” Vanguard (three discs). Baez combined an angelic voice and social activism in a way that made her the queen to Dylan’s king in early ‘60s folk music. Though the quality of her subsequent work was remarkably uneven, this package does a good job of isolating the best work.

It also contains almost two dozen previously unreleased tracks, including a duet, “Mama, You Been on My Mind,” where she and Dylan get confused over the words, and a version of Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried” where the band has to stop and start again because Jerry Reed gets his finger stuck in his guitar. Best price found around town: $45.

* * * * * The Beach Boys, “Good Vibrations: Thirty Years of the Beach Boys,” Capitol (five discs). A bonanza. You get every Beach Boys hit you ever heard on the radio--from the carefree exuberance of “California Girls” to the wistful innocence of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”--as well as almost every album track that mattered.

The icing, however, is a 76-minute disc offering an intimate look at the artistic process of Brian Wilson. Among the surprise treats: the demo for “In My Room,” one of Wilson’s most personal and moving pieces, and studio experimentation on such landmark tracks as “God Only Knows” and “Good Vibrations.” $60.

* * * * Elvis Costello & the Attractions, “2 1/2 Years,” Rykodisc (four discs). The time span saluted in the album title--the 30 months it took Costello in the late ‘70s to record his marvelous “My Aim Is True,” “This Year’s Model” and “Armed Forces” albums--represents what may have been the most remarkable burst of creative songwriting energy since Dylan and the Beatles used to put out two albums a year.

Besides the original albums, the boxed set includes some two dozen rarities and live tracks plus the 1978 “Live at the Mocambo” Toronto concert recording that has been available previously only as a bootleg. $45.

* * * * Bing Crosby, “His Legendary Years 1931-1957,” MCA (four discs). Frank Sinatra is widely regarded as the greatest pure pop singer of the last 50 years, but even he had to be influenced by someone--and he points most frequently to Crosby, who helped redefine the art of pop singing with his relaxed, crooning style and personalized phrasing.

Though you can find more of the early development of Crosby’s vocal style in Columbia Records’ “The Crooner” box set, it’s these recordings that established Crosby for almost three decades as the most dominant commercial singer in American pop music. A major historical document. $65.

* 1/2 Emerson, Lake & Palmer, “The Return of the Manticore,” Victory (four discs). How’s this for a bad idea? You don’t just go back and re-record for this set “Pictures at an Exhibition,” which may have been the classical-minded British rock trio’s most unlistenable work, but you also record some of the songs associated with the band members before ELP (such as Arthur Brown’s “Fire”) and after ELP (Emerson, Lake & Powell’s “Touch and Go”). Oh my. $47.

* * * * Janis Joplin, “Janis,” Columbia/Legacy (three discs). This Port Arthur, Tex., blues-rock spitfire threw herself into the music on stage with such raw, foot-stomping urgency and abandon that once you saw her, you never forgot her. No singer since, male or female, has ever appeared quite so naked emotionally, brash and defiant one minute, tender and vulnerable the next.

The album contains more than a dozen previously unreleased tracks, including her acoustic demo version of Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee,” the song that was a hit after Joplin died in 1970 of a drug overdose. In a typical wisecrack, she jokes at the start of the track about not being able to hear her guitar in her monitor: “Not that I play that great, but still and all, I ought to be able to hear it, you know what I mean?” $41.

* * * * Otis Redding, “Otis!,” Rhino/Atlantic (four discs). You need to go back to the ‘50s to Sam Cooke and Ray Charles to document the birth of modern soul music, but give equal attention to the classic records--including “Dock of the Bay” and “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now)”--that this young Georgia singer made for Stax / Volt between 1962 and his death at age 26, in a 1967 plane crash.

Redding’s influence on soul singers has been widely acknowledged, but the liner notes also carry testimonials by such other artists as Peter Gabriel and reggae’s Toots Hibbert. $50.

* * 1/2 Diana Ross, “Forever . . . Musical Memories,” Motown (four discs). Bet you didn’t know that the Motown superstar has had more Top 40 hits as a solo artist (27) than as a member of the Supremes (25). But that string of hits doesn’t mean the solo work was substantial or entertaining enough to justify three discs. $50.

* * * 1/2 Paul Simon, “1964 / 1993,” Warner Bros. (three discs). Simon has always been more interested in his writing than his performing, which is why this classy collection centers chiefly on his post-Simon & Garfunkel period, where his music tended to be more sophisticated and revealing.

Indeed, no one in contemporary pop music has chronicled as deftly the tensions and values of a generation as it moves from youth to middle age. Despite the ambitiousness of the accompanying booklet, the set seems too modest when it comes to music. There is still too much Simon material of worth missing to make this feel as comprehensive as it should--especially at this price. A fourth disc--with more treats such as the demo for “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” which is included--would have pushed it up to five stars. $55.

* * * * “Tougher Than Tough--The Story of Jamaican Music,” Mango (four discs). This splendid survey traces the evolution of Jamaican popular music from the early American R&B; imitations of Laurel Aitken’s “Boogie in My Bones” through the assertion of the musicians’ own socio-cultural attitudes and bite in such movements as ska, reggae and dancehall. This is music that, for the most part, is as instantly infectious as American Cajun, yet as boldly independent as the strongest rap. More than simply one selection from Bob Marley, the music’s greatest figure, would have earned the collection the maximum rating. Essential. $60.