Two big mergers in the music business have occurred recently. Only one, though, affects jazz as a living, breathing art form.

The Sony-BMG merger was a seismic occurrence for most of the music industry – and it will certainly affect the way jazz’s heritage is reissued and repackaged – but recording and distributing new jazz albums is not one of the new company’s priorities. Just last week, though, it was announced that Concord Records had acquired Fantasy Records, which contains just about the most glorious catalog of modern jazz in any one place.

This is big news for any jazz fan, because both labels are actively engaged in recording new jazz, both by veterans and new artists.

Both mergers are part of the music business’s own retrenching. Sony and BMG just merged in order not to get bigger but – in a sense – to get smaller. The recording industry’s has been in a financial swoon, and the company want to reduce their overheads and prune down their artist rosters and payrolls. The Fantasy/Concord merger, on the other hand, is about getting stronger by getting larger.

Concord Records, originally named Concord Jazz, was founded in 1973 by Carl Jefferson, a car dealer and jazz lover who staked himself in the jazz record business when it was at a low ebb, and then profited as the music merged from the ashes over the last three decades. Concord’s strength has been giving veterans like Rosemary Clooney, Chick Corea, and Mel Torme a place to do whatever they wanted. They’ve also launched several important careers, most notably youngster Peter Cincotti.

Brothers Max and Sol Weiss Fantasy Records in 1949, and for most of the last few decades was owned by movie mogul Saul Zaentz. Fantasy had a relatively small jazz catalog until it began accumulating other labels. The most important were Prestige Records and Riverside Record, which between them produced a goodly share of the most important recordings of the 1950s and 1960s, and had then gradually gained control of Contemporary, Pablo, Milestone, and Debut. Fantasy’s most important active artist is Sonny Rollins, often cited as the greatest of all living jazz musicians. Its back catalog includes most of Mr. Rollins’s discography, along with classic works by Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and virtually every other giant of the modern era.

The new company, Concord Music Inc., will be second only to Blue Note (the very active jazz division of EMI) in terms of distribution, prestige, and overall resources. The three older conglomerates, Columbia (Sony), RCA (BMG), and Decca-MCA (Universal) still have better coverage of jazz’s first half-century, from New Orleans through the Big Band era. But Concord/Fantasy has by far the deepest representation of the last 50 years.

More significantly, Concord/Fantasy will be signing and promoting new artists. Proceeds from the back catalog traditionally has always been what bankrolled releases by new artists, but in recent years major labels have all but abandoned new jazz: Sony, BMG, and Warner Bros are all out of the picture, Universal-owned Verve is on a limited schedule, and only Blue Note is operating at full steam.

The combined Concord and Fantasy Catalogs should provide enough revenue to allow the label to continue to take changes. Jazz and other alternative musics benefit from the weakening of the major labels, but jazz in particular is insulated from the very worst effects of the current drop in new-music sales. Pop labels look to make their money back in one fell swoop, as soon as an album is released. Jazz albums are an investment in the future.

Bob Blumenthal, the jazz critic who also works for Branford Marsalis’s Marsalis Music pointed out, “in pop, they focus on one artist selling a lot of records in a short time, whereas in jazz a record has to be around for a while before it makes a difference. ‘Kind of Blue’ wasn’t a chart hit when it was first released, but it wouldn’t be the milestone that it is if Columbia hadn’t kept it in the catalog all these years.” Mr. Blumenthal noted that one of Fantasy’s most respected practices was to keep as much music as possible in print. Everything they have issued in the CD era is still available.

As smaller labels have taken on more of the responsibility of finding and releasing new music, the distinctions between large- and small-label artists have also become much blurrier. It used to be that, when an artist graduated to Columbia, it meant they had come of age. Now Concord/Fantasy is an equally good indicator of – and probably a better incubator for – precocious talents.

The merger of Concord and Fantasy makes them, as their publicists claim, “the Leader in Independent, Adult-Focused Recorded Music.” But the combination of these two independents into what is – for the purposes of a jazz fan – essentially another major, indicates the end of an one era and the beginning of another. Concord/Fantasy may carry on in the old way, preserving the legacy of past musicians while uncovering new ones, but more of the everyday of work of finding and publicizing new, talented artists is being done by even smaller labels.

The span of these mid-sized outfits is remarkable, from the Cleveland-based Telarc – whose two biggest attractions are Dave Brubeck and George Shearing, two superstar pianists in their mid-80s – to Palmetto, whose releases roughly center on members of the New York Composers Collective. Some labels concentrate on a given area, like the Boston-based Accurate Records, the Pennsylvanian Evidence Records, and the Canadian Justin Time. Others take in a genre, like the vocals-centric Maxjazz; the newer, Latin-oriented Zoho; and Arbors Jazz, which is all but alone in terms of documenting the great living swing and traditional jazz players. Companies like Sons of Sound and Joe Fields’s High Note all take considerably more risks than the conglomerates.

Several of the most important midsized labels have one performer-producer at the center of its activities. As of now, the most visible of these is Marsalis Music, which is based in Boston and distributed by the international independent Round Records. In its first two years, Marsalis Music has released eight CDs and two DVDs. Half feature Mr. Marsalis as either leader or sideman, including the recently-released “Eternal,” a collection of ballads that might be the best album of Mr. Marsalis’s prolific career.

In the last few weeks, two more of these musician-centric “boutique” operations have been announced, Greenleaf Music, operated by trumpeter Dave Douglas in conjunction with Michael Friedman of Premonition Records, a very aggressive Chicago based independent. Dare2 is focused on the bassist and bandleader Dave Holland under the aegis of the much respected Sunnyside Records.

All three of these musicians are highly regarded and much sought after. Operating their own label was hardly their only option. Mr. Holland ended a decades-long relationship with ECM, a German-based firm that specializes in contemporary jazz and is distributed by Universal. Mr. Marsalis could have stayed with Sony, the only label he has recorded for as a leader until now, or gone with another major. Instead, they launched their own operations.

To me, that’s an indication that the entire notion of labels as baseball leagues, whereby talent moves “up” from the so-called minors to the majors, is fast becoming obsolete – and that jazz itself is alive and well.