Category: Features

The Great Ebay Debate

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Three years ago, in the previous iteration of Jazz Collector, we had a heated discussion about the pros and cons of eBay, spurred by a letter from the Blue Note expert Larry Cohn. I’ve been updating the site with a lot of the old material and posting it with the original dates. This one, however, I thought was worth reprising as a current entry, since the blog format of posting comments is just perfect for this type of discussion. Please take a look, starting with Larry’s original letter, read the comments, and then feel free to post comments of your own.

“Hello Al, from Larry Cohn in NYC. Like you I have been collecting jazz LPs for decades and was surprised by the major rise in prices beginning in the 1980s, largely spurred by Japanese collectors. However, I don’t think we can take as seriously the recent eBay phenomenon.

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Reader Forum/Hot Topics

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We’ve set up a new section on the site called Hot Topics. We’re hoping that it evolves into something like a Reader Forum, where collectors can come and ask questions about collectibles and can get answers from other collectors within the community. At Jazz Collector, we don’t claim to be experts on everything in the jazz collectible world, but we know that collectively our readers have all the expertise anyone would ever need.  I will add a question and several responses that we received this week on this post to show how it works. If you have a question about any jazz collectible, just post it as a comment on this post and let’s see if we can generate some responses.

Price Guide Updated

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We’ve updated the Price Guide in a number of ways over the past few days. We added about 35 new entries, including a copy of Louis Smith, Smithville, that sold for more than $1,500, a copy of Sonny Clark’s Cool Struttin’ that sold for 3,750, the Count Basie RCA record with the Andy Warhol cover and several 10-inch LPs that are making their first appearance on the Price Guide, including the Max Roach Quartet on the Debut label. To take a look at the most recent entries, you can sort by clicking the Timestamp button at the top right and making sure the most recent entries are on top, by the date on which they were posted.

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Any Comments?

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A couple of days ago we sent out an email to all of our newsletter subscribers from a few years ago. It was interesting in that most of the people that replied, did so via email rather than going to the Web site and posting a comment there. We are trying to get people used to the idea of commenting directly on the site because we believe it’s a great way to interact directly with other collectors, and to get your questions answered. So we’re going to take the liberty of taking some of the email we’ve received and posting them as comments on this post. For those of you who are new to the site, all you have to do to reach out to fellow collectors is click on the “comments” link above and write away.

Sonny Rollins: A Birthday Tribute

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Tuesday was Sonny Rollins’ 78th birthday. Happy Birthday, Newk.

First time I saw Sonny was in the early 1970s at the Village Vanguard. Sonny wasn’t playing live when I first got into jazz. He was in one of his several retirements. I’d go to clubs in the city and see Bill Evans and Monk and Roland Kirk and Elvin Jones and Jim Hall and they were all great. But Sonny was my hero, and he was the one I was aching to see in person.

So I was quaking with excitement that first gig at the Vanguard, a dark, rainy, gloomy Tuesday night. Who knew what to expect? Read more

Jackie McLean, The New Tradition, At What Price?

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We’re back posting regularly on the blog, which means we’re back to watching eBay. It’s been a while and, from what we can tell, the prices have held pretty steady over the past couple of years. We’re looking at a batch of records over the weekend and we’ll summarize them in a few posts today, tomorrow and Saturday as well. One of the records on our list is Jackie McLean, The New Tradition, Ad Lib 6601. This is, of course, one of the premium jazz collectibles. If you look in our Price Guide, Read more

A Question About Record Cleaners

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We took an unexpected break for a couple of days. Sorry about that. Here’s a note from a new subscriber:

“Al: Just discovered you site tonight and have been happily reading your commentaries and exploring your links for the last couple of hours. I expect to lear a lot from you and your correspondents and will contribute what expertise I can offer. I have been collecting jazz and classical records for 30 years. Am a member of IAJRC and a frequent bidder on eBay and mail order auction lists. I have about 4,000 LPs and 3,500 CDs. Mine is not the largest library, but it’s the one I want to have because the items in it are a picked lot. I specialize in small group Swing, Cool and Hard Bop. Particularly dig mainstream tenor saxophonists active from ’50 to ’70 and their modern successors. In your 7/01/05 Riffs you suggested eBay sellers should buy a professional record cleaner. I don’t plan to auction off my collection, but I would like to get such a machine, in order to clean some of my LPs. Do you or any of your readers know where I can buy one? Best, John Herr.”

I replied that I’m very happy with my VPI cleaner, the HW-16.5, which sells for $500 or so. I recommended he do a Google search on record cleaners and, specifically, VPI. In doing my own search I discovered some record cleaners in the $3,000 and up range. Curious if anyone out there has ever used one of these high-end cleaners and whether they do that much more to clean up the sound than the $500 models. If you have any comments, post them on the site.

Today’s Rarity: Eric Dolphy on the FM Label

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I’m always looking for information on records I see on eBay that I haven’t seen before, either online or in real life. I’ve been collecting jazz records for more than 35 years and have spent thousands of hours poring through record stores all over the U.S. and in parts of Europe, yet I still come across items that are new to me. Here’s one from eBay the other day: Eric Dolphy, Conversations, FM 308. This was a sealed Stereo pressing sold by Atomic Records for $317.90. It had five separate bidders and was sold to ondemand12, one of the big eBay jazz buyers. Read more

Filling in Some Blanks

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As we go through records preparing to sell them on eBay, we always seem to find a few that fail to list the accompanying musicians. When this happens, we go through our source material to try to fill in the blanks. Among the resources we use most often are The Jazz Discography by Tom Lord, which we have on CD-ROM; various Internet sites, such as The All Music Guide; plus several discographies we have in our collection, including those for Blue Note, Savoy, Prestige, Verve, Clef and Norgran.

Whenever we find this information we will post it on the Website. So here are some of our recent findings: Read more

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