Another Adventure in Jazz Collecting, Baltimore Part 3

So before I could call Rob and talk about the records, I needed to have two other conversations. The first was with Dan. Dan and I have been friends since first grade and we got into collecting jazz records at around the same time. Dan was always much more aggressive and adept than me at finding great records and he amassed a great collection, which at some point nearly 30 years ago ended up in my hands. We have always shared our hunts and scores and so I called Dan to tell him about the collection in Baltimore. He heard some of the titles and basically said: “You should have those records.”

Next up? The Lovely Mrs. JC, of course. I told her that there was an interesting collection that someone had sent me on email. She saw the familiar gleam in my eye.

“Where is it?”

“Baltimore.”

“How much?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is it really good?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t spoken to the guy yet.”

“Well, I trust you. Do whatever you need to do.”

Doesn’t get any better than that, does it? The Lovely Mrs. JC gets my vote for the Wife Hall of Fame.

I was ready to have the conversation with Rob. In a situation such as this, I want to assess whether the records are originals, whether they are in good condition, whether the seller wants to sell them all at once, and whether his/her expectations for price are reasonable. I don’t want to overpay for the records. I want to pay a fair price and be honest with the seller without necessarily sharing every bit of knowledge I’ve accumulated over the past 43 years of jazz collecting. Beyond that, I’d rather not talk about price in this forum, since it’s really between the seller and me. Suffice to say, I believe I pay top dollar for any collection I buy, and certainly more than the prices I’ve seen from dealers.

At 10:30 on Sunday morning November 17 I placed the call to Rob in Baltimore. We chatted for a while, about boxing and football and fantasy football, which is another obsession of mine. I got the sense he was a very nice guy. After a few minutes I asked him to tell me about the records. This is what he told me:

The records were owned by his uncle Bruce, his mother’s brother. Uncle Bruce died sometime in the mid-1970s and Rob’s parents ended up with the records. The records basically were sitting in the basement of his parents’ home untouched for nearly 40 years. When Rob’s father passed away last year, Rob ended up with the records. He had them in storage for a while, then he had them just sitting in his apartment. It was a lot of records, more than 20 boxes, and Rob just didn’t want to move them anymore, so he wanted to get rid of the lot. He and his brother had started compiling a list of the records, which was the list he had sent me, but it proved to be a more complicated and time-consuming process than they had anticipated and they were hoping to find someone who would take the whole collection and pay a fair price for it.

Uncle Bruce, Rob continued, was supposed to be a very serious collector. There was talk that his collection was one of the finest anywhere and that at some point a local paper had written an article about Uncle Bruce and the collection, but no one was able to locate the article. There was also speculation that after Uncle Bruce died a friend of his named Horace had gotten hold of the collection and taken out some of the choicest of the choice records, so perhaps the collection in Rob’s apartment was not all it could have been, but Rob could tell just from a quick perusal of Jazz Collector that there were certainly some records of value still in the boxes.

I told Rob that based on the list he had sent to me, it seemed, indeed, that there were records of value, depending upon their condition and whether they were original pressings. Rob said that Uncle Bruce seemed to be a stickler about the condition of his records, and most of the records seemed to be unplayed. He also said many were in plastic sleeves, particularly the titles that he had seen on Jazz Collector. He said the one potential problem was that Uncle Bruce had written in ink the date when he purchased the records on the back covers. This distinct mark was on most of the records.

I got the sense that the records were in good condition and I also had the sense that many were probably original pressings, based on when Uncle Bruce had died and when he had been collecting. But, before offering a price and planning a trip to Baltimore, I needed some more information. I asked Rob to try to find one record on the Prestige label and one on the Blue Note label.

The first one he picked was Herbie Mann, Flute Souffle. I asked him to look at the record’s label. What color? Yellow and black. What’s the address? 446 W. 50^th St., N.Y.C. Good, I said. It’s an original pressing. It’s not a very valuable record, but it’s an original. That’s a good sign. Now a Blue Note. Rob said he found one in the same box with a very nice cover. What was it? Jutta Hipp with Zoot Sims. Good, I said. What’s the address on the label? 161 Lexington Avenue.

That was all the information I needed. I told Rob I would be interested in buying the collection and would be willing to drive down to Baltimore to pick it up, all of the records, including the classical box sets, so Rob wouldn’t have to worry about getting rid of them, I’d just pile them all in my car and take them off his hands. I told him I couldn’t set an exact price until I had actually seen the records, seen the condition, made sure the ones I wanted were original pressings, made sure they weren’t moldy from sitting in a basement, etc. I told him if the records were originals and were in the condition he had described I would pay him within a certain range for the entire lot. After a bit of discussion we agreed on a price range. I reminded him that he could get more money by cherry picking the best records and selling them on eBay, but he wanted to get rid of the entire collection, wanted to sell someone who would appreciate it, and realized that the price I had offered was much higher than what he could get from a dealer.

So, I asked, do we have a deal? Yes, he answered, we have a deal. When, he asked, do you want to pick up the records?

I had a crazy week before me. I was traveling to Boston for business on Tuesday and then working the WFMU Record Fair in New York the following Friday and Saturday. I also knew I would have to borrow a bigger car to haul all of the records. The earliest it seemed feasible for me to get a car and drive down to Baltimore was the following Sunday. I suggested that to Rob. Fine, he said. So we set a date. On Sunday, Nov. 24, I was set to drive down from New York City to Baltimore to pick up a collection of about 1,000 records, including Jutta Hipp With Zoot Sims, Flute Souffle, Jackie’s Pal, Wailing With Lou and, of course, an Evening with Concertgeouw Orchestra, Amsterdam, and An Evening with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra.

What happened next? Stay tuned for Part 4 tomorrow