A New Adventure in Jazz Collecting, Part 3

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

I trace the roots of this latest chapter in The Great Jazz Vinyl Countdown back to a post I wrote on Jazz Collector on July 28, 2022. It was simply called Updates. In this midst of writing about a bunch of records on eBay, I went off topic based on a comment from our friend Maarten Kools — the idea of spending time with the records and enjoying them while also enjoying the process of thinning them out. Then, I wrote this: “If someone would have the wherewithal to buy one of the world’s greatest jazz collections in one shot, you know where to find me.”

The next day I received an email. The sender said he did, indeed, have the wherewithal to buy a collection like mine. Henceforth, I will refer to this individual as KC Ken, short for Kansas City Ken, which is neither his real name nor real location. Anyway, I checked him out on LinkedIn and it didn’t take more than a minute to determine that yes, he did have that kind of wherewithal. I wrote back and suggested we chat.

I will spare you the gory details, but eventually he agreed to buy about 1,000 records at what I considered to be a fair price. The good thing, from my end, was that it did not include any original Blue Notes or Prestiges, or Coltrane, Rollins, Bill Evans, Clifford Brown, etc. I would even keep most of my doubles. But KC Ken did have certain requirements and one was that the records all be in M- or better condition. They also had to be original pressings from the 1950s up to 1970.

In order to put together the right package for KC Ken I had to do an enormous amount of work. Hauling hundreds of records out of storage, bringing hundreds of  records from New York to The Berkshires, pulling records off the shelves, throwing my collection into shambles, looking at every single pre-1970 record in my collection, putting together lists that he could peruse. It was nearly a three-month project that was both time consuming and arduous. By the time we finally reached a deal in mid-October, I was really ready to part with the records, no second thoughts.

Then, one day after we did a virtual handshake on the phone, KC Ken reneged. Said he changed his mind. Fair enough. He was certainly entitled to do what was best for him. I felt he should have apologized for putting me through all of that work and then backing out of the deal. I guess he didn’t think so, because he never did apologize. At the time, I figured, maybe it’s for the best. Maybe I wasn’t ready to part with that many records yet. Maybe I was better off not sending so many nice records to a person who had a lot of money, but perhaps not a lot of class.

So, I hauled hundreds of records back to storage, moved hundreds of records back to my apartment in New York, put an icepack on my sore back, reorganized my collection once again, and put this misadventure with KC Ken in the rear-view mirror. But, in some ways, the die had already been cast. I was mentally ready to part with records, this just wasn’t the right deal or the right person.

So what changed between mid-October and early February, when I reached out to Carolina Soul Records? Stay tuned.