Commenting on the Comments

If you’ve been watching Jazz Collector this week, perhaps you’ve noticed a lot of the back-and-forth discussion around two of our posts: Another eBay Debate: What’s the Value of a Dealer’s Reputation, and Today on eBay, February 2, 2009, which is dealing with the provence of the Andy Warhol cover on the record, Thelonious Monk, Prestige 7053. We’re thrilled to see all of the comments — it’s what we had hoped for when we started the site. We’ve kind of stayed back ourselves, but we just posted a comment on the article regarding the eBay debate. The gist of our comment, which you can see by clicking on the article, is that the market for jazz collectibles is driven by all of the participants in the market and focusing on any one group or groups of buyers misses the point, in our opinion. In fact, we are spectacularly grateful that the music we cherish is cherished as well by so many people around the world. Face it, if the fate of jazz were strictly in the hands of the American public, it would be a sad day for all of us who love the music. As for the Monk record and the Warhol cover, I’ve kind of left it to our readers to sift through this one, since I don’t have any definitive answer on the subject. It seems as if through the discussions, however, we may have reached some fairly accurate version of the truth.