Jackie McLean, The New Tradition, At What Price?

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, you can see that we’ve monitored copies selling for as much as $3,500, although in better condition than this copy. This one is labeled VG+/VG and the seller does not provide any more specific information on how it sounds. The starting price is $700 so, if you’re thinking about bidding on it, you might want to ask some questions.

My personal story about this record: I had a copy back in the late 1980s/early 1990s. The cover was VG the record was about VG, maybe VG+. I had a dealer come to my house offering what were, at the time, pretty good prices for rare collectibles. This was before eBay set the whole market spinning, of course. Well, I was saving money for a boat and he offered my $500 cash for the Jackie record and I took it. I haven’t found a copy of the record since. And the boat sank.