Jazz Vinyl Countdown? HAH!

So much for whittling down my collection. Last night, I bought another batch of albums, about 300 altogether. So, let’s see: Since I started this Great Jazz Vinyl Countdown two weeks ago, I’ve decided to sell 12 records. In that same period, I’ve managed to purchase 300 records, for a net gain of 288 records. At the rate I’m going, in three years I’ll have a half a million records and I’ll be living in a straitjacket. In any case, there is a story behind the purchase of these records, which I will tell. A couple of weeks ago I accompanied the lovely Mrs. Jazz Collector to a party of her colleagues. She told me there would be many other spouses there.  She was wrong: There were three others, and two of them fell asleep before the hors d’oeuvres were served. So that left me and another guy. We started chatting. I told him about Jazz Collector. “Really,” he said. “I’m moving to California in two weeks and I was thinking about selling my jazz collection.” “Really,” I said. “This could be

the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” He told me more about what he had: A bunch of Japanese reissues, a batch of Miles Davis, lots of Bird, Ellington, Basie. Clearly he had good taste in music. He was also aware of the market for the collectible records: “I don’t have any West 63rd Blue Notes or New York Prestiges,” he said, so I knew he was knowledgeable. The only collectible he claimed to have, he said, was an original 6-eye Columbia pressing of Miles Davis Sketches of Spain, which he didn’t want to sell.

Anyway, time was critical, he was packing for California, he was pulling the records out of storage, and he needed to move quickly. So we stayed in touch and last night I went to his apartment to see the records. It was a three-story walk-up. Not a good start. I looked through the first batch of records: There were some beauties — Lee Morgan, The Cooker; Fats Navarro on Blue Note; Bill Evans on Riverside. But, as he warned, they were all re-issues, many of them Japanese pressings. There was also a nice Mosaic boxed set and a lot of other reissues that, unfortunately, don’t have a lot of market value: Count Basie, Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller, for example.  Anyway, he had to get rid of them, I had my car and my checkbook, and a half hour later we were lugging record boxes down three flights of stairs. This morning I took an inventory: There were about 300 records in all, 24 of them Japanese Blue Notes, including a couple that were issued for the first time in Japan. There were also about 60 other Japanese reissues — Verves, Norgrans, Riversides, Emarcys. There were Bird reissues on Dial, a lot of Miles reissues and some Monk reissues. They are all in beautiful condition.

The question is this: What am I going to do with them? The idea of this Great Jazz Vinyl Countdown was to end up with less records than I started with. But there were these 300 records staring me in the face. What was I to do? Ignore them? Allow them to get on a truck to California? So here they are, sitting in my basement, and some will end up in the collection, and some will end up on eBay and some will follow me around for the rest of my days and perhaps someday I will put them on a turntable and listen to them, provided the straitjacket is not tied too tightly and I am able to move my arms.