Serious jazz fans tend to be record collectors, and more often than not we are obsessed with record labels. Our extensive knowledge of what company is responsible for which recordings often baffles casual listeners, but to some of us, it’s almost as important as the artist. Most hard-core jazz buffs can tell you that, for instance, Jackie McLean’s early Prestige albums sound completely different from his classic later Blue Note records.

Yet there have been relatively few full-length histories of major jazz record companies: Richard Cook’s “Blue Note Records: The Biography” and Rick Kennedy’s “Jelly Roll,Bix and Hoagy: Gennett Studios and the Birth of Recorded Jazz” are among the best. Now comes Ashley Kahn’s “The House That Trane Built: The Story of Impulse Records,” which, in a way befitting its subject matter, is the most ambitious book of its kind — and it comes accompanied by a four-disc retrospective containing 264 of Impulse’s finest minutes.

Impulse Records, more than any other company, consciously sought to make labels a going concern among jazz fans. The first jazz-specific subsidiary of a major broadcasting conglomerate, Impulse developed its identity as the home of John Coltrane and 1960s avant-garde jazz. Not only did the music sound different from what other labels were putting out, the finished product even looked unique. For most of my life, I kept all my Impulse albums together on the shelf — whether they were by Coltrane or Pee Wee Russell — because from the side they formed an enormous black-and-orange stripe that was visually pleasing and made the records impossible to lose track of.

Whereas most of the major jazz labels — Commodore, Blue Note, Verve, Prestige, Riverside, SAVOY — started as totally independent concerns and were later absorbed into major corporations, Impulse began life as the jazz wing of ABC-Paramount. The ABC executive Creed Taylor, who had already produced many notable jazz albums for the company, came up with the idea of starting a jazz imprint within the larger framework of ABC-Paramount in 1960.

Mr. Taylor only remained at Impulse for a few months, but it was long enough for him to sign Coltrane and put forth a clutch of bebop offerings featuring J.J. Johnson, Art Blakey, and Freddie Hubbard, among others. After Mr.Taylor departed to replace Norman Granz at Verve, Bob Thiele took charge for the rest of the 1960s.

Thiele had produced several outstanding dates with Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young on his own Signature label, and was more oriented toward swing than Mr. Taylor had been. One of his most important projects for Impulse was an outstanding series of Duke Ellington-oriented small-band albums starring the Duke’s Men: Johnny Hodges, Lawrence Brown, Paul Gonsalves, Ben Webster, and Ellington himself.

Thiele was also an egomaniac who put his own picture on a disproportionate share of Impulse back covers and even contrived to release albums as an artist himself,even though he could neither play nor sing. Yet he knew a good thing when he saw it.As Coltrane quickly became Impulse’s most popular artist, Thiele was wise enough to sign other artists Coltrane recommended. The most successful of these were the tenor saxophonists Archie Shepp and Pharoah Sanders, both of whom played in Coltrane’s bands at various times.

Thiele and his successors — Ed Michel, Steve Backer, and Esmond Edwards — went on to work with virtually every major jazz musician of the period, including Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins, Oliver Nelson, Ornette Coleman, Benny Carter, and Albert Ayler. Still, by Mr. Kahn’s estimate, no less than 25% of Impulse’s total output was either by Coltrane or one of his disciples, and, out of the label’s 40 most popular releases, nearly half were by Coltrane himself. As Mr. Michel told Mr. Kahn, Impulse became the label of “the angry black tenor man. They weren’t all angry, they weren’t all black, they weren’t all tenor men, but that was kind of what it appeared to be.”

“The House That Trane Built” is a far-reaching narrative that encompasses the musical, financial, and social history of the Impulse label. Mr. Kahn has interviewed dozens of artists and executive personnel connected with the company and discusses hundreds of Impulse albums, either in detail or in passing. Although the book has a substantial text, it also benefits from a coffee-table layout that features session photographs, reproductions of album covers, inner sleeves, and other promotional artwork. (The 32-page booklet that comes with the four-CD box is even more visually impressive in that, unlike the book,it comes in full color on glossy paper.) Mr. Kahn has reviewed virtually the entire output of the label, and my only bone of contention with him is that he devotes too much space to lesser lights such as Gabor Szabo and Gato Barbieri, and not enough to classic vocal albums like Jackie Paris’s “The Song Is Paris” and Lorez Alexandria’s “Alexandria the Great.”

The music in the boxed set is similarly illuminating: I think of Mr. Shepp’s Impulse albums as epitomizing the era of the “angry tenor man,” and I had forgotten that he could also come up with a danceable riff such as 1966’s “Mama Too Tight.” It must have been impossible to be restricted to a mere six tracks (40 minutes) of the hundreds of classics recorded by John Coltrane for the label, and equally difficult to come up with one relatively listenable selection by Ayler, whose late 1960s Impulse efforts were sabotaged by a misguided attempt to reach a pop audience. The disks also contain such delightful diversions and distractions as “Salt and Pepper,” a wailing blues by the unexpected team of Gonsalves and Sonny Stitt, Earl “Fatha” Hines’s very personal yet sufficiently Ellingtonian take on “Black and Tan Fantasy,” and a pair of pleasantly pop-ish offerings by drummer Chico Hamilton that introduce two future stars: “Forest Forever — Sunrise” with saxist Charles Lloyd and “Larry of Arabia” with guitarist Larry Coryell.

Impulse itself had a very good run: Both of its mainstays, Thiele and Coltrane, phased themselves out gradually — even though Coltrane died in 1967,the company continued to release previously unissued material by the man who was already being known as “The Jazz Messiah” for many years to come. By the mid-’70s, Impulse’s signature orange-and-black gatefolds had long since been subsumed in psychadelia. The label was finally phased out after ABC was absorbed into MCA, a process that was completed in 1979. The name “Impulse” has since been put on the occasional album, most notably on Alice Coltrane’s standout “Translinear Light” in 2004, but the brand is pretty much known today only as an ongoing series of reissues.

Although Impulse recorded everything from swing to soundtracks, the label became most closely associated with the “new thing” of Coltrane and company. Yet around the same time Impulse was formed, Verve Records was acquired by MGM Records to serve the same purpose that Impulse did for ABC (Verve is now the jazz wing of Universal Music) and a few years later, Blue Note was bought by Liberty Records and eventually was re-tooled as the jazz subsidiary of EMI. It seems that Coltrane, Thiele, and Impulse Records anticipated the future in more ways than one.

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Coincidentally, another worthy book has just been published detailing the history of a record label with a specific musical and visual identity. “Mouse Tracks: The Story of Walt Disney Records” by Greg Ehrbar and Tim Hollis (University Press of Mississippi) is the last word on the label that did for children’s music what Impulse did for jazz. Like Mr. Kahn’s book, this one is in a similar coffee-table format, profusely detailed, and driven by firsthand accounts from many of the participants.

Among the many compelling characters Messrs. Ehrbar and Hollis profile are basso Thurl Ravenscraft, the singing narrator of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” and the voice of Tony the Tiger, as well as studio singers Sally Sweetland and Loulie Jean Norman, whose voices grace countless recordings but whose careers have never been profiled at length. Considering Coltrane recorded “Chim Chim Cheree” (from “Mary Poppins”) on an Impulse album, it seems likely that many baby boomers began by buying Disney albums and eventually graduated into Impulse customers.