Adventures In Jazz Collecting: Red Carraro, Part 2

I can’t tell you all how much pleasure it gives me to see the many wonderful comments about Red Carraro from his family and friends, as well as from the many jazz collectors whose lives he touched. This was why I started the Jazz Collector site in the first place, to build this kind of community. That it has actually happened is intensely gratifying, as you can imagine.

But I also left you all in the middle of a story, with me in a cast clutching a batch of records, sitting with Red in his basement, with no way of getting home. So there were Red and I sitting there, no idea what to do, when the door flung open and Dan came charging down the stairs again.

“Are you giving me the record?” he said.

“No,” I replied.

He looked at Red, as if Red should fix this with a Solomon-like gesture of perhaps breaking the record in half. But Red was not interceding in this internecine battle between a couple of half-crazed teenage jazz fans he had pretty much just met. He smiled wanly and said something like, “Dan, you’re not going to leave your friend down here, are you?”

So Dan and I left together, and I clutched my pile of records, including Music For Torching.  We didn’t talk all the way home and we didn’t talk for the next couple of months, if I recall properly. In fact, when my mother would see Dan’s mother in the Associated Supermarket, she would shun her. Thanks, mom.

But eventually Dan and I made up and remain best friends. And I still have my copy of Music For Torching. And Red stayed in our lives for the better part of the next three decades and I will tell more about that in the next post, but I did want to complete the story and also acknowledge all of the many nice comments about Red in the earlier post. I would also encourage anyone else who knew Red to please step forward with a story or two.