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Finding a Rare Lee Konitz, Right On My Own Shelf

Apr 30, 2010 78-RPM Records, Features, Prestige

I have many hundreds of records I’m hoping to sell and on rare occasions someone may come to the house to peruse them. I don’t necessarily encourage this, but if I know you from Jazz Collector I’m generally OK with it. Anyway, the other night I had one of our readers come over and it turns out he was an alto player who was associated with the Lenny Tristano school and had played with Sal Mosca, Lee Konitz, Warne Marsh, Billy Bauer and others. He went through the records I was selling and didn’t find anything he liked and asked if I had an 78s I’d be willing to sell. I do have more than 1,000 78s and I have been willing to pare this down and among the more than 1,000 78s I happen to have about 100 Prestiges in mint, unplayed condition. I purchased these Prestiges on

a business trip to Chicago 25-or-so years ago. They were sitting on a bottom shelf at the Chicago Jazz Record Mart and I was blown away and bought as many as I could fit into a carry-on suitcase, which I purchased especially for the transport of these records.

Anyway, I pulled out a few of these Prestiges from Lenny Tristano and Lee Konitz and said he could purchase any of them for $15. They all looked mint, but he wanted to hear what they sounded like and on my little Califone desktop school record player we placed a 78 with the Lee Konitz version of the Jerome Kern classic Yesterdays. I am not an expert in early Konitz so I was not familiar with this recording. My guest, however, was an expert and as soon as I put the record on the Califone he stopped everything he was doing.

“What is this?” he said.

“Yesterdays,” I replied.

“Yes it is Yesterdays. But I have never heard this version.”

I went to my 10-inch Lee Konitz Prestige and put on Yesterdays and, indeed, the version was completely different. The one on the 10-inch LP featured Miles Davis on trumpet. The one on the 78 was just a trio of Konitz, Sal Mosca on piano and Billy Bauer on guitar. My guest, who was, as noted, an expert on the music, had never heard the trio version. So we did what you would expect: We went to the computer, Googled Lee Konitz and made an interesting discovery: The version on the 78 was issued only one time, literally, on the 78 that was playing on my Califone record player. It was Prestige 755 and, really, I had no idea. My guest was quite intrigued at this rare find and I kept to my word and sold him the 78 for $15 and he was quite pleased to acquire this extremely rare copy of some pretty decent music.

Somewhere in here is a moral to this story, but I can’t figure it out now and I have to go because, believe it or not, there is another collector perusing my records right now as I type this. Who knows what we’ll discover this morning.

Tags: Lee Konitz