By WILL FRIEDWALD

When Miles Davis was 9 or 10, his “Uncle Johnny” bequeathed to him an old second-hand horn; a few years later, Miles’s father observed that the boy had grown very serious about practicing and decided to buy him a brand-new trumpet for his 13th birthday. Davis would gradually make himself into, quite possibly, the most important trumpet player in American music after Louis Armstrong. Surely, Davis wasn’t the greatest virtuoso—many others could play higher, faster, or louder—but he did more with the instrument, took it into more new areas, and pioneered more kinds of music than almost anyone else in jazz.

For the first time, a new release celebrates not just the sound of Davis’s trumpet but the sheer physicality of the instrument. Scheduled for release by Columbia/Legacy on Sept. 14, “The Genius of Miles Davis” is an actual trumpet case housing 43 compact discs, as well as a working trumpet mouthpiece (a replica of Miles’s own), plus such “extras” as a lithograph of one of Davis’s own artworks and a T-shirt. The new release is a triumph of pure packaging: The case contains eight previously issued boxes (now sub-boxes), among them the six-CD “Miles Davis & John Coltrane: The Complete Columbia Recordings 1955-1961″ and the five-CD “The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions”; there is no previously unreleased or even newly remastered music in the entire production. I would hope that anyone purchasing one of the 2,000 copies of this numbered and limited edition, which weighs a whopping 21 pounds and costs an even more whopping $1,199, would own a display case to house it in—or even an altar.

For roughly 50 years, the concept of the record album—whether in LP or CD format—engendered an agreed-upon ratio of music to packaging. When you bought an album, particularly something historical (which, in the classical music field, is practically everything), you generally knew how much you were getting in terms of photos, lyrics and liner notes. In the past five years or so, the music to packaging relationship has headed in two radically disparate directions: While younger listeners download sound files (both legally and otherwise) with no packaging at all, the older demographic supports releases with increasingly elaborate boxes, booklets (by now genuine hardcover books), and other paraphernalia, of which “The Genius of Miles Davis” is merely the most extreme.

Why are such spectacular, high-ticket releases flourishing in an age when physical CD sales (of individual discs, at least) are steadily declining? Bruce Resnikoff, CEO of Universal Music Enterprises and Verve Music Group, said when we exchanged emails recently that these releases are aimed at “a very committed and active segment of the music-buying public who crave both quality music and packaging the way art collectors crave a classic painting or an iconic photo. This has become even more apparent as the industry has shifted from a purely physical model to a digital model.” Universal releases most of its deluxe boxed sets on its Hip-O imprint, including last year’s very successful Ella Fitzgerald four-CD set “Twelve Nights in Hollywood” (reviewed in these pages) and, more recently, the excellent three-CD “Nat King Cole—Riffin’: The Decca, JATP, Keynote and Mercury Recordings.”

Michael Cuscuna, president at Mosaic Records (which practically invented the jazz boxed set for the CD era), feels that such packages are thriving while “physical CDs are in free fall because, for the collector or gift-giver, they are something historic and substantial. The major labels have labored to include lots of bells and whistles: A DVD is almost mandatory these days.” Incidentally, while the “Genius” box, atypically, does not include any video component, Sony has also issued two new deluxe editions of the classic 1969 album “Bitches Brew” that both contain a DVD of a previously unissued Copenhagen concert from that year. (The “Legacy Edition” of “Bitches Brew” contains two audio discs plus the DVD; the “40th Anniversary Collector’s Edition” consists of three CDs and two LPs in addition to the DVD. Neither of these are to be confused with the four-CD “The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions” box, originally released in 1998, that is included in the “Genius” set.)

Mr. Cuscuna, who produced most of the individual sub-boxes being re-reissued in the trumpet case, adds, “Much as the business plan for the Lamborghini Murciélago is different from the Toyota Prius, the ‘Genius’ set does not need to sell in volume to be highly successful.”

It’s good news that companies like Sony-BMG and Universal are keeping iconic music in print; the only downside is that they seem to be constantly repackaging the same albums and artists over and over while even slightly less celebrated performers are overlooked. And while the packaging of the “Genius” box is the most ostentatious, it’s hardly the biggest box that Legacy has produced. That honor would go to “Miles Davis—The Complete Columbia Album Collection,” released last year: 71 CDs and a comparative bargain at $365 (a little more than $5 a disc).

Obviously, the music and the continuing popularity of Miles Davis are both sturdy enough to withstand such constant scrutiny. Davis—who is perhaps the only jazz musician in recent history with the following of a pop-music superstar—is surely the only trumpet player who will ever get this kind of treatment. The next big-ticket item on Legacy’s schedule is “The Complete Elvis Presley Masters,” a 30-CD box commemorating what would have been the King’s 75th birthday. And to answer your next question—no, it’s not shaped like a giant hound dog.

Mr. Friedwald writes about jazz for the Journal.