Another Adventure in Jazz Collecting, 10-inch Edition

After buying, curating and eventually selling the Ornette Collection from Dee, I felt myself gripped in that very old, very familiar, somewhat obsessive feeling of wanting more. Not necessarily more records because, Lord knows, I have enough records. No, it was all about wanting more action. So, I reached out to my friend here in The Berkshires who is planning to sell his collection at some point, but he said he isn’t quite ready yet to part with them. Then, out of the blue, another friend up here sent me a note with a link to an online auction of jazz records that was being conducted locally. The site was something called Caring Transitions, so I clicked the link and this is one of the pictures I saw:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Certainly, there was enough in that picture to pique my interest. Gil Melle 10-inch Blue Note, Bill Evans Sunday at the Village Vanguard, Art Pepper on Tampa, Jimmy Raney, Bird, and that weird “Let’s Have a Session” 10-inch LP on Ad Lib, which is perhaps the first “Music-Minus-One” record ever, featuring, among others, Billy Bauer on guitar, with whom I had a one-degree-of-separation personal relationship. More on that later.

Digging deeper, there was a lot more. Bill Evans Waltz for Debby; the Kenny Drew 10-inch Blue Note; an Art Farmer 10-inch Prestige; The Tal Farlow 10-inch Norgran. And here is what I thought: This is a local auction, no one probably knows about it. These records are all going to sell significantly below market value. I also thought that I better not write about this on Jazz Collector. But any of you would have probably done the same if you were in my shoes. At least, it eases my conscience to think that way.

My first instinct was to see if I could just buy them all. So a sent out a blind note, asking if that was possible and ethical. Turns out it was ethical and possible, theoretically. So I asked what would be a reasonable price, from the seller’s standpoint. I was a bit surprised because it was probably pretty accurate in terms of the retail value. Which also meant that it was high. I figured I could probably get the records I wanted much cheaper on the auction, so I politely declined. I asked if it was possible to see the records and the woman running the auction replied that I wasn’t the first to make the request so she had set up a couple of viewing times. This was good news and bad: I would get to evaluate the condition, but it also proved that there were other interested parties locally. This was pre-pandemic and only about 30 minutes from my home here in The Berkshires, so at the proscribed date and time I knocked on the door.

There were two older women. Now I say “older” in a new context these days because they were probably of my generation or maybe just a little older. So I say that without judgment or prejudice. It just seemed by appearances that they wouldn’t have been jazz record enthusiasts. And they weren’t. But they were good researchers. They had discovered   Popsike and Discogs and had done their homework, looking at literally every record out of a collection of hundreds. They had a pretty good idea of what they had and what the retail value might be if they had chosen to sell the records on eBay. They also divided the records into different lots: Some consisted of three or four records; a few were much bigger; and several, such as Waltz for Debby, Sunday at the Village Vanguard, Kenny Drew, Gil Melle, Art Farmer, Billy Bauer and others were single lots.

They key, of course, was condition. And the condition for most of the records was excellent. Waltz for Debby, clean as a whistle; Kenny Drew, the same; Tal Farlow, which was part of a lot, very, very nice. Obviously the owner had taken good care of the records. I made a few notes for myself, chatted a bit with the ladies about their business, discussed the records, and told them I would definitely be bidding and I would hope to see them the following week when it would be time to pick up my winnings.

Between the time that I saw the records and the time that the auctions would actually close, I would go to the site periodically to monitor the bidding. My initial feeling that everything would be a bargain turned out to be a disillusion, to say the least. As the action kept getting closer, I was watching Waltz for Debby go from $100 to $200 to $300 and beyond. The day before the auction, Kenny Drew was over $200. I already crossed those off my list, sadly. No bargains there.

However, there were other lots where the bidding was low and/or stagnant. These were primarily the 10-inch records, aside from the Drew, Melle and the Farmer. There was also one lot of about a dozen records where they clearly missed and misplaced one of the gems in the collection: Among a group of routine records by Herbie Mann and Oscar Peterson there was what appeared to be a beautiful mint copy of the Art Farmer Quintet Featuring Gigi Gryce, Prestige 7017. You had to look carefully at the picture to even see this record and the bidding was pretty low, so I figured, hmmmm, I will definitely be able to steal this one.

The auctions were closing on a Monday evening starting around 7 p.m. and staggered over a two-hour period. I wanted to place my bids close to the ends of the auctions, but not so close that I couldn’t adjust if I was outbid on an item I really wanted. Unfortunately many of the auctions closed at the same time, or within minutes of one another, so there wasn’t that much time to adjust. I must admit, it was a lot of fun sitting at the computer waiting for the auctions to end and seeing if I would win anything and what that might be. I was really focused on the 10-inch records because they were getting limited action, as opposed to the Bill Evans, Art Pepper and other 12-inch LPs. I also had my eye on that lot with the misplaced Farmer on Prestige.

Yada, yada, yada, I ended up winning about 20 10-inch LPs for a total of about $150. This included the Tal Farlow, which I really wanted for personal reasons. It did not include the misplaced Farmer. I would have liked the Billy Bauer, but it had a start price of $50, which didn’t seem worth it so I didn’t bid. Turns out, many of these records that I won are duplicates of records I already own, but now that I am self-isolating here in The Berkshires I will probably have the time to go through them all and upgrade the conditions of my personal copies wherever I can.

Aside from the fun and the adrenaline rush, this latest adventure served another good purpose: It scratched the “I-need-action” itch. Since then, I’ve quelled the urge to just keep buying. I can’t say I have completely satisfied that urge –or that I ever will satisfy that urge—but now it is back to being suppressed rather an open sore.

I will have a coda to the story that will explain the Billy Bauer and Tal Farlow connections, and to follow up on some other info, such as the four-figure bid on Waltz for Debby and the fact that the Bauer record, in the end, is actually sitting here on my shelves. But that will have to wait until the next post. In the meantime, take a gander at the auctions I won: