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Many of the most enduring jazz recordings were produced by enthusiasts who started their own labels to share their pleasures and discoveries. Among them: Alfred Lion and Frank Wolff (Blue Note), Milt Gabler (Commodore), Bill Russell (American Music) and Norman Granz (various labels). Less known is Steven Dolins, whose The Sirens is devoted to blues and boogie-woogie.

Mr. Dolins, who teaches computer science at Bradley University in Peoria, Ill., started The Sirens in 1976 when still a teenager. Although the rent parties where boogie-woogie and other classic blues flourished were in decline in Chicago by then, Mr. Dolins gathered five keepers of this heritage -- Willie Mabon, Sunnyland Slim, Jimmy Walker, Blind John Davis and Erwin Helfer -- in "Heavy Timbre." The set has been reissued with bonus tracks, and like all of the label's recordings it exemplifies what Bob Dylan told me about the blues 40 years ago: "What made the real blues singers so great is that they were able to state all the problems they had; but at the same time, they were standing outside of them, and could look at them. And in that way they had them beat."

On "Heavy Timbre," Blind John Davis -- who worked with "Sonny Boy" Williamson, Tampa Red and other legends -- sings his own "A Little Every Day," a slow, deep meditation that begins with "Every day I have the blues." Beneath his haunting words, the life force of the pulsing piano presages another day. On the same set, Helfer -- influenced by Jimmy Yancey and Cripple Clarence Lofton -- is like a train barreling through the night in "The Fives," the exultant essence of fast-blues boogie-woogie.

Twenty-five years after "Heavy Timbre," Steve Dolins held a session -- "8 Hands on 88 Keys" -- celebrating the continuing vitality of the tradition, with Helfer, "Barrelhouse" Chuck Goering, Emery "Detroit Junior" Williams and "Pinetop" Perkins. Now 90, Perkins still plays gigs; and on this recording session, in "I Almost Lost My Mind," he begins: "I'm gonna tell you peoples, the news was not so good. This time she's gone for good." He goes on to remind us of our own darkest times of abandonment. But at the end, Pinetop chuckles and says "bye-bye." These bards, no matter how lowdown for a time, kept on keeping on.

On Pinetop's "I Almost Lost My Mind," the accompaniment is by Helfer. And on the same date, Helfer, now 67, continues to expand as well as revere the tradition in Yancey's "Four O' Clock Blues." His background in jazz and Baroque music has not diluted his passion for the intimacies of the blues.

Helfer has his own CD on The Sirens label (www.thesirensrecords.com). In "I'm Not Hungry but I Like to Eat -- BLUES!" he is joined on four tracks by a subtle and personal tenor saxophonist, John Brumbach, who fuses blues and jazz lines. Helfer adds new lyrical dimension to Duke Ellington's "In a Sentimental Mood," while his "Swanee River Boogie" made me feel I was having my own rent party.

Helfer's "Homage to Pete Johnson" recalled for me the excitement of first hearing Pete Johnson, Meade Lux Lewis and Albert Ammons in the boogie-woogie explosion of the late 1930s. It was the Blue Note label that helped Johnson gain renown that lasted only a few years. But as The Sirens label gets better known, Helfer, already much appreciated in Chicago, should gain a wider and lasting audience. (He did play the Berlin Jazz Festival this year.)

The sound quality on Helfer's set and "8 Hands on 88 Keys" is exceptional. They were recorded on a Baldwin concert grand at Sparrow Sound Design in Chicago with the owner, Bradley-Parker Sparrow, himself a jazz pianist, as the engineer. And the 1976 "Heavy Timbre," recorded on a Steinway grand piano, has been digitally remastered at Sparrow Sound Design with resounding success. Since many of these pianists triumphed over much less than state-of-the-art pianos and studios through the years, it's heartening that the vividness of their music has been preserved by Steve Dolins.

Four of the five pianists-singers on the 1976 "Heavy Timbre" are dead -- Sunnyland Slim, Willie Mabon, Jimmy Walker and Blind John Davis. In a recent interview in the Chicago Reader, Mr. Dolins said that he would like to produce recordings by other blues pianists. But having preferred to specialize in this particular lineage, with few masters of it left, "I just don't know how many more CDs I'll be able to put out." Those he does release, however, will endure.

These sessions are a reminder that while it is a commonplace that the blues is the common language of jazz, not all jazz players have been deeply into the blues. Although the textures of the blues were in her sounds, Billie Holiday did not consider herself a blues singer. In his autobiography, Dizzy Gillespie wrote: "Blues is the music of my people, but I'm not what you call [an authentic] 'blues' player." But Charlie Parker, he said, was.

Steve Dolins is a blues man and, like the other insistent amateurs before him, he is sharing his love of the music with a growing number of fortunate listeners.

Mr. Hentoff last wrote about Fred Astaire for the Journal.

Updated January 8, 2003 12:02 a.m. EST