Guest Column: Hub Cats of Jazz

There’s been a lot of chatter on Jazz Collector this week about record stores in various locales, including New York and San Francisco. One of our regular readers and commentators, Jason, has submitted a guest column on jazz in Boston — not the stores, but the music itself from the 1950s and 1960s. So here’s Jason:

“When I first thought of writing a post about jazz in Boston during the 50s/60s, I thought it would be easy. It wasn’t, and the problem is Boston itself. When one considers jazz and geography it is usually New Orleans, Chicago, Kansas City and New York come to mind as sources of talent and innovation. Not Boston. New Orleans could claim Dixieland. Kansas City had Read more

Guest Column: An LP Trip To NY

Thanks again to Rudolf for his very special guest column on French Vogue. It is garnering quite a bit of attention and conversation. We will be offering a few more guest columns in the next week. One of our regular patrons, Don-Lucky, is at the Ottawa Jazz Festival and has promised some reports and another regular patron, Jason, offers up this item about a recent trip to New York, where he paid a visit to the famous world headquarters of Jazz Collector. Here’s Jason:

“After several 84-hour work weeks I’ve finally gotten around to accepting Al’s offer to blog about my trip to NYC. Last April the wife and I made our way from Boston for a show at the Apollo. Since the show wasn’t until much later I thought I’d make a first time trip to Infinity Records out on Long Island after reading about it here. Only I never made it. Read more

A Comprehensive Guide To French Vogue

Our friend Rudolf Flinterman has written a comprehensive treatise/opus/tribute to the French Vogue label and has graciously asked us here at Jazz Collector to publish this and make it available to fellow jazz collectors all over the world, which we are pleased to do. We are attempting to publish this in two formats here, one as a post, below, and separately as an attached PDF file that you can download and print and save. So, without further ado, we turn it over to Rudolf, with all due respect and appreciation:

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A Blues Walk & A Visit to A Shrine

Perhaps CeeDee started a trend this week with his guest column. Here’s another from our friend Don-Lucky:

A ‘Blues Walk’ in NYC…

“Lou Donaldson at the Vanguard on Tuesday April 6th, 2010 was one of the best sets I’ve seen there in a while and well worth the long drive down to NYC from Ottawa. The first set began with Lou’s theme song Blues Walk and escalated through a series of standards and into Alligator Boogaloo from there. He was accompanied by Randy Johnston on guitar, Pat Bianchi on the organ, and Fukushi Tainaka on the drums… It didn’t stop there, Dr. Lonnie Smith dropped in to pay his respects for the second set, along with a quick cameo by Roy Hargrove, and a few vocals by singer Champion Fulton. Definitely worth the trip. Although Lonnie seems to think I owed him money from the last time he was in Canada. Don’t ask me why !

As for the rest of the trip, I did manage to drop in on Rudy Van Gelder at his fabled studio in Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,  on the way out Wednesday morning. That’s the studio in the picture above. Rudy wanted

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Guest Column: Making The Case For CDs

When we started Jazz Collector we invited members of the community to contribute to the site and, if you check out the About page, we apparently still do. To date, no one has really taken us up on the offer and all of the posts have been written by yours truly, which has been fine. The other day, however, we got a note from one of our readers asking if he could post an item and, of course, the answer was yes. So here it is:

“Greetings-my name is Ceedee and I’m a jazz collector. I’ve been using this music and the never-ending search for the next ‘must-have’ as a source of pure pleasure and inspiration for nearly 40 years now. And if the latest list of items I’m watching at eBay is any indication, it’s a search that’s not about to end any time soon. It’s the access to collections and collectors worldwide that eBay has made possible – not to mention great web sites such as Jazz Collector – which go a long way towards enabling this ‘healthy’ habit.

Before the 12-step analogy goes any further, let me assure you that for me, it has been necessary

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