Welcome to The New, Improved Jazz Collector

Oh my goodness, I woke up this morning and, like many of you perhaps, I was surprised to see a whole new Jazz Collector site. Well, probably not as surprised as most of you, because I knew this was in the works, but I wasn’t expecting it to happen quite so soon and before I even had a chance to discuss it on the site. Anyway, here’s what happened. Tom Stier, the guy who handles all of my Web stuff (since I’m a techno-phobe at heart), informed me a few months ago that the site was going to suffer in Google rankings unless we updated the theme and made it more mobile-friendly. I put off making the move for awhile, just because I didn’t want to be bothered and, since this has never been a money-making proposition, slipping in Google rankings didn’t really have an impact on me. At the same time, we had been talking about adding a real Forum to the site, rather than the cobbled-together effort I had made in the past. Finally, for some reason last week,

I decided to move forward and Tom started doing his magic. I had thought the work had stopped over the weekend, but apparently it hadn’t. He was busy doing all of the things we had discussed and, voila, I woke up this morning to the new more mobile-friendly, more user-friendly Jazz Collector. It’s actually not all that different than what we had, only easier to read and more modern-looking. It will also travel much better on smart phones and tablets. In addition, we have the NEW!FORUM, which is a real forum for a change. With Tom’s help, I put in several potential topics, but I’m pretty sure anyone can add a topic at any time with my approval. If that’s not the case, I’ll let you know. I didn’t want all of the information in the old forum to disappear, so that’s also available as always as READER FORUM, although at some point I will take that off of the main menu and put it somewhere else on the site so as not to confuse anyone once we actually start getting comments on the NEW!FORUM. Anyway, I hope you are all pleased with the results. As always, I welcome your comments and suggestions. Thanks for you support and for continuing to make this a fun community.

P.S., Tom says there may be a glitch or two in the next few days, so keep me posted if you have any problems.

Now, on to some jazz vinyl:

Our friends at the Jazz Record Center have a new auction this week, with a few signed photographs and some other memorabilia, with a few records thrown in as well, including this favorite of mine: Ernie Henry Quartet, Seven Standards and a Blues, Riverside 248. This is the original deep groove blue label version of the record, in M- condition for both the record and the cover. It’s interesting that this blue label is the original because this has to be right at the transition point when Riverside moved from white labels to blue labels. Anyone know the last of the white label originals? I imagine the answer is somewhere in the old reader forum, but it’s probably too buried to find easily. Hopefully the new forum will alleviate that challenge.