A New Adventure in Jazz Collecting, Part 2

The pix with these posts are copies of some of the records to be auctioned. The real pics will be with the listings.

Let me start this new adventure with a post from Jazz Collector from Sept. 29, 2009. I had the audacity to call it The Great Jazz Vinyl Countdown, and this an abridged version of how it began:

“I counted my records the other day. At least I counted most of them. I have more records than I want. I have them in four separate rooms in two separate homes. I have records I have owned for more than 25 years and have never put on a turntable. I have records by artists I don’t especially like. I have collected them because I am a collector. It’s what I do. That is why my site is called Jazz Collector.

“I counted the records because I have made a fairly momentous decision, and that decision is this: I am going to get rid of many of them. This is heresy, is it not? These are my friends, all hand selected personally by me. I have invited them into my home, to share my space, to give me comfort and joy in times of stress or sorrow. And they have served me well, all of them, in whatever way they could. But the time has come to part with many of them.”

As I said at the time, this was a fairly momentous decision.

I don’t think it lasted more than a few days. I either didn’t want to do it or simply couldn’t do it. Whatever the reason, there never really was a Great Jazz Vinyl Countdown here at Jazz Collector. In fact, I went in the opposite direction. Within two weeks of that post, I sold 12 records and bought 300. I had a net gain of 288 records: “At the rate I’m going,” I wrote at the time, “in three years I’ll have half a million records and I’ll be living in a straitjacket.”

Less than three years later, I purchased the Irvin Kalus collection, about 2,500 records in all. A year and a half later, I purchased the Bruce M. West collection, about 1,500 vinyl, plus a few hundred 78s. There’s collection here in my neighborhood that I first saw more than five years ago. I’m still pursuing it.

Instead of shrinking, the collection has grown in both quality and quantity in the 13-plus years since the beginning of The Great Jazz Vinyl Countdown. I love hunting for and buying records. Been doing it since I can remember. It’s been a major part of my life. People know me as a jazz collector. You all know me as Jazz Collector. It’s an important part of my identity.

But . . . .

Obviously, the idea of paring the collection down has been on my mind for a while, at least since Sept. 29, 2009. Why did I finally decide to act on it now, and how did about 700 of my records end up in Durham, North Carolina with Carolina Soul Records? Stay tuned.