Sounds Of The Season: Selections Of Note Gift-wrapped Music Jazz Stocking-stuffers, From Dinah To Django

A passion for jazz is becoming an expensive proposition, and not just

because videocassettes and compact discs have added to the record-buying pinch.

We jazz fans tend to be completists. Those of us in thrall to Charlie Parker, for example, feel deprived without every scrap of music he ever recorded. That is why there is a market for multi-record (or disc) sets containing, say, Charlie Parker's entire output for Verve, including false starts and alternate takes.

Such reissues, which retail for a good amount of money, blur the distinction betweeen luxury and necessity. In addition to Parker, this year's crop includes sets devoted to Dinah Washington, Duke Ellington, Bing Crosby, Django Reinhardt and Commodore Records (a groundbreaking independent jazz label of the '30s and '40s).

But who can afford all of these, especially given that records and compact discs are not the only consumer items we have to fit into our budgets? Jazz is now old enough to have accumulated a history, and there are costly reference books we feel we must have. And countless jazz performers have been the subjects of documentary films, most of which are now available on home video. These are indispensable, but they entail a sacrifice - they cost at least as much as three new records or two new CDs.

The solution? This time of year, especially, it pays to have generous friends and relatives. Any of the items listed below would make a thoughtful Christmas gift for the jazz fan on your list.

RECORDINGS. Bird: The Complete Charlie Parker on Verve (Verve 837 141-2). Ten CDs housed in a box big enough to hold LPs, this is the most lavish of the reissues fathered by Clint Eastwood's film about the alto saxophonist who re- created jazz in his own image after World War II.

At first glance, it looks like nothing more than the CD equivalent of Verve's 1984 10-record Parker box, which was also billed as complete. But almost two hours' worth of previously unheard Parker is included here. Although most of this newly discovered material consists of alternate takes, three performances with Ella Fitzgerald from a 1949 Jazz at the Philharmonic concert amount to a major find.