Back in the Wacky World of Jazz Vinyl on eBay

Back on eBay. Just watching. Not buying. Not selling. Here is some of the jazz vinyl I’m watching, starting with John Coltrane, A Love Supreme, Impulse Mono A-77. This is an original pressing with the white promotional label. Petty rare. The record is listed in M- condition and the cover is also M-. There are already 28 bids and the price is in the $1,400 range, with the auction closing later today. Based on Popsike, the highest price ever for a white-label promo of A Love Supreme was about $2,500. Looks like this one may get close to that. How many white-label promos do you think they printed? Maybe 200? 300 max? There can’t be that many around in this kind of condition. Read more

Another Adventure, Part 5

Garner copyWell, yes. Yes, I would be interested in the records at around the price that we had discussed nearly two months earlier. Now, recall, I had still never seen the records. They were in Toronto and I was in New York. The guy selling them admittedly didn’t know much about them, other than what he had gleaned from the Jazz Collector Web site and the Fred Cohen Blue Note book. He also told me that many of the records were from England and South Africa, which meant that it was still possible they were not original pressings. If it wasn’t a big investment for me, I wouldn’t have cared that much. But we were talking about a hefty hunk of change, a few thousand dollars, for essentially 25 or so records. This was definitely a risk on my part. So I made a suggestion: I would send him one third of the total price and he would send me 25 records, of which there would be at least 10 of the Blue Notes. If the records were as he said—original pressings, nice condition—I would then send him the rest of the money and he would send me the rest of the records. There were some more negotiations. Again, I won’t bore you with the details. Eventually we struck at deal. I took a deep breath, wrote out a check, put in the mail and waited.

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