This week’s theme: Songs from the Ellington Songbook, vocal and instrumental versions. Songs include Cottontail, Lush Life, In a Sentimental Mood, In a Mellowtone, Come Sunday, Take the A Train, Just Squeeze Me, and more. Artists include John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Anita O-Day, Johnny Hartman, Mahalia Jackson, Dizzy Gillespie, Wes Montgomery, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, Elvin Jones, Coleman Hawkins, Clark Terry and more.
Don-Lucky, if you are out there, we need you. Or any other autograph experts. I was just perusing eBay on this lovely but chilly Sunday morning in the beautiful Berkshire mountains of Massachusetts and I came upon this listing: Rare Signed By Charlie Parker + Coleman Hawkins 1947 Norman Granz #6 78-RPM Set. And when you open this listing there, indeed, are signatures bearing the names Charlie Parker and Coleman Hawkins. They are clearly signed with the same pen at the same time. The question is: Do they seem legitimate? I’m not expert enough to know. The reality is, I think, for the seller and any potential buyer, it would be very difficult to authenticate something signed before Bird died in 1955 if it hasn’t been authenticated already. Plus, this is not a program from the JATP at which they were both in attendance, but a pair of signatures on the record, which came out many months later. So, someone would have brought this record to a concert or club where both Bird and Hawk were at the same time, and would have gotten them both to cooperate for an autograph signing. I don’t have the expertise of Don-Lucky, but color me skeptical. In any case, the seller has an asking price of more than $2,400 and the auction closes later today. My guess is that even if the signatures were fully authenticated, that would still be a price beyond market value, although, I have to admit, if the signatures were authenticated, it would be an item of interest to me personally. A real Bird autograph, actually signed by Bird. Yeah, I could enjoy having that in my collection. Read more
This week’s theme: Welcoming in 2025. Artists include Coleman Hawkins, Oscar Brown Jr., Ella Fitzgerald, Lou Donaldson, Wynton Kelly, Herbie Harper, Charlie Mariano, and many more. The conceit is records that have 25 in the catalog number.
This week’s theme: Two-tenor LPs. Featured artists include John Coltrane, Paul Quinichette, Sonny Rollins, Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Rouse, Ben Webster, Sonny Stitt, Al Cohn, Zoot Sims, Gene Ammons, Dexter Gordon, Paul Gonsalves, Hank Mobley.
This week’s theme is blues-influenced jazz and jazz-influenced blues. Artists include Lavern Baker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Horace Silver, Billie Holiday, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Roy Eldridge, Jimmy Rushing, Big Joe Turner, Count Basie, Lambert Hendricks and Ross, Joe Williams.
Here’s a nice one that I don’t recall seeing in the past: The Essen Jazz Festival All Stars, Debut 131. This record features Coleman Hawkins, Bud Powell, Oscar Pettiford and Kenny Clarke. I’ve always known this by the Fantasy issue in the U.S., which, if I recall, was colored vinyl in the original pressing. This looks to be the original Dutch Debut pressing, which was in stereo? Not familiar with it, although it is somewhat surprising that stereo would be the original release in 1960. Anyway, I like this cover a lot better than the U.S. cover. This copy is listed in M- condition for both the record and the cover and has a start price of $400 with nearly six days left on the auction.
So it came to that Monday, June 25, and I was driving down from The Berkshires to drop the lovely Mrs. JC off at her office in Great Neck and I was then to head out to Massapequa to see this record collection. And I really had no expectations about the collection and no real desire to see it and was feeling I was doing it just as a favor to the woman who sent me the e-mail to help her out because, clearly, her father loved jazz and it would be a nice thing to do. So I told the Lovely Mrs. JC, who tends to get nervous when I am around too many records, that there was nothing to worry about, that it was not a collectible collection and I would just take a look at it and give them advice and not be bringing any more records home. No problem, I said, but the look in her eyes was a familiar combination of doubt and dread.
I got to the house in Massapequa at the appointed time, put my dog Marty in a carrying bag and was greeted at the door by a muscular young man who let me in and told me his name was Adam and it was his grandfather’s collection. And then Adam’s mother appeared, and she was the one I had been e-mailing with, and introduced herself as Karen. I assumed Adam was there to ensure that I wasn’t some wacked out crazed record collecting nut, which seemed like a reasonable expectation at the time and I thought this was a wise decision on their behalf. Karen appeared to be a few years younger than me, but of my generation, and we started chatting and we had a very nice rapport because we had in common, among other things, fathers who were obsessed with jazz music and jazz records.
So I mentioned the other day that I recently purchased a record collection. Here is the story.
A few weeks ago a woman sent me the following e-mail:
“I’m wondering if you can help me. My dad passed away suddenly in an accident. He left a huge jazz collection of approximately 2500+ vinyl albums. He died at 82 and was a jazz enthusiastic since his teens and his collection dates back to then. To his great disappointment I did not share his passion for jazz. I am interested in selling his collection. How can I go about finding its value? I’ve read some of the information on your blog and realize I need to consult an expert. Any guidance you can give would be greatly appreciated.”
I get emails like this fairly often now that I do Jazz Collector. They usually don’t turn out to be much. I generally look to help people over e-mail and my advice if they have anything collectible is to usually tell them to try to sell the records on eBay. I’m not necessarily looking to purchase collections: I’m still a collector and not a dealer and I have way more records than I have places to keep them. Some of you, Rudolf I’m sure, may even recall that I began a project several years ago to pare down my collection, which I grandly labeled The Great Jazz Vinyl Countdown. Needless to say that project is quite defunct.
Was perusing eBay this morning, taking a break from my real work, and these are some of items I stumbled upon:
Coleman Hawkins, The Hawk Flies High, Riverside 233. From my experience, we don’t see too many Coleman Hawkins records garnering collectible prices these days. We only have a few mentions of Hawk in the Jazz Collector Price Guide. So I was surprised to see that the bidding for this record had already surpassed $150, closing later today. I was surprised again to see that the record was not an original pressing — it has the blue label as opposed to the white label. It is in nice condition, however, M- for the cover and the record.
This record was closing just as I was perusing, not that I would have bid on it: Charlie Mariano With His Jazz Group, Imperial 3006. This was an original 10-inch pressing in VG+ condition for both the record and the cover. It was sitting at $95 with three minutes left and wound up selling for $180. It also had more than 150 page views, which surprised me. Glad that people are still interested in 10-inch Charlie Mariano records.
CeeDee beat me to it, but there’s an interesting article in today’s New York Times: Great Jazz, Long Unheard, Is Rediscovered. It is the story of an audio engineer named William Savory, who recorded live radio broadcasts in the late 1930s. What is particularly compelling is that he used 12-inch and 16-inch disks and even used the 33-1/3 RPM format so he could record extended performances and solos that were much longer than the standard three minutes or so that were captured at the time on a 78. The music has been donated to the National Jazz Museum in Harlem and presumably will make its way to the public, although there are questions raised in the article about copyright and ownership. Among some of the performances mentioned are a live version of Billie Holiday singing “Strange Fruit” and a six-minute Coleman Hawkins solo on “Body and Soul” It’s worth a read. The article includes audio clips.
