According to Popsike the highest previous price for New Soil has been $1,500, but that seems to be an aberration because that is the only prior copy of this record to ever sell for more than $1,000. As for me, I purchased a Stereo pressing for $100 at a record show many years ago, and was promptly taken to task by my friend Red Carraro, who spotted me walking around with the record and told me that I over paid for a stereo copy in only VG or VG+ condition. But then I took the record home and put it on the turntable and had no regrets at all. It sounded great, stereo or mono. Which prompts me to wonder: When, if ever, will we have in-person record shows again? Here in the States, not too soon I would imagine.

Here’s another LP from the same seller: Relaxin’ With the Miles Davis Quintet, Prestige 7129. This is an original New York yellow label pressing that also looks to be in M- condition for both the record and the cover. The bidding is at $395. This record has crossed the $1,000 barrier once before. This is one of my favorites of the Relaxin’/Cookin’/Workin’/Steamin’ sessions, possibly because of the specific tracks and the intro by Miles that made its way onto the recording. Of course all of those record are great. Also particularly fond of Steamin’ because I had never heard the song Diane before and it was my mother’s name, so every time I listen to the record I think of both my mother as well as my dad, since he was a huge Miles fan and spent many an hour listening to Miles on the Fisher record player in our living room in Queens.

A few more: Lee Morgan, Lee-Way, Blue Note 4034. This looks to be an original West 63^rd Street pressing in M- condition for both the record and the cover. I noticed something odd about the listing – the date stamp on the picture is from 2017. I guess if I was bidding on this record, which I’m not, I’d ask the seller if the picture is from the album currently up for auction or is it from someone else’s auction. Same with the Jackie McLean New Soil Record. If you click on the picture you can see it clearly 05/07/2-17. Just sayin’. It is a really nice, clear picture, but which record? Bidding is at around $700 with about four days left on the auction.

Joe Henderson, In ‘Out, Blue Note 4166. This looks to be an original New York USA label, probably in M- condition for the record and VG++ for the cover. Bidding is in the $420 range with more than five days left on the auction.

Surprise, here’s one I’m NOT interested in: Freddie Redd, Shades of Redd, Blue Note 4045. This looks to be an original West 63^rd Street pressing in VG condition for the record and the cover. The start price is around $400 and so far there is no action with the auction closing in six days. In case you missed it, I filled in this gap in my collection a few months ago.

Herbie Hancock, Maiden Voyage, Blue Note 4195. This looks to be an original Mono New York USA pressing. The record is listed as VG++ and the cover as VG+. Bidding is already at $800 with six days left, with 16 bids and 65 watchers. Guess there’s a lot of interest in Maiden Voyage.

Finally, one more from the Prestige vaults: Coltrane, Prestige 7105. This looks to be an original New York yellow label in VG++ condition for the vinyl and VG+ for the cover. The bidding is at about $600 and there are still six days left on the auction.

Another one from CeeDee’s email, and also from Funkyousounds: Booker Ervin, Groovin’ High, Prestige 7417. This was an original stereo pressing with the blue labels. It’s a later Prestige, but it seems to be gaining value with the passage of time. This copy sold for $202.49. No complaints from me, since I have the album and I also enjoy it very much. Booker was definitely one of the most underrated of the tenor players. His style was very recognizable and he always played with great passion and creativity.

This is another one, closing as I type this, where condition is an issue:

Lou Donaldson, Swing and Soul, Blue Note 1566. This was an original pressing listed in VG condition for the record and probably VG for the cover as well. The bidding was at $127.50 and are there any last minute bids . . . . . . nope, it sells for $127.50. I do have a spare copy of this record in better condition than this one, so it gives me some basis for the current market if I decide to sell or trade.

Irving Kalus was 82 years old when he died on December 22, 2011. It was early in the evening and he had just gone to the record store around the corner, Infinity Records, in Massapequa Park on Long Island. He bought a Miles Davis record and was crossing Sunrise Highway when he got hit by a car and was killed instantly. I didn’t know Irving Kalus personally, but I seem to know him quite intimately now, at least in connection with one particularly important area of his life: His love of jazz. It was Irving Kalus’ collection that I purchased a few weeks ago and I would like to share what I have learned about the man and his life-long passion for jazz.

Irving fell in love with jazz when he was a teenager. His son Gary remembers him telling stories about musicians he had met – the time Sarah Vaughan kissed him on the cheek, the times Dizzy Gillespie would talk with him outside a club before or after a gig. Bud Powell once fixed him a drink: “He called it a Joe Louis because he said it will really knock you out,” Gary recalls his father telling him. Irving picked up on bebop quite early and it clearly had a profound influence on his life.

In 1949, when he was just 20 years old and bebop was still in its early years, he wrote a thoughtful, compelling and heartfelt tribute to Charlie Parker for an advanced composition class at New York University. He titled the paper “Ornithology” and he kept it all of these years. He was proud of it, appropriately so. After I purchased the collection his daughter Karen gave me a copy. I was moved by several things, particularly the quality of the writing, the advanced ideas Irving expressed and his awareness of the impact that Bird would have on music, even at that early date. The paper included some direct quotes from Bird, some of which I had never seen before, and I wondered if perhaps Irving had spoken to Bird himself.

The other thing that really struck be about the paper: Not only that Irving saved it all of these years, and that Karen and Gary saved it, but the date on the paper: December 22,1949, the same day that Irving died 62 years later. A little eerie, no? Anyway, I will post the paper in full tomorrow.

There is something oddly intimate about going through someone else’s collection. I could see how he organized his records, which musicians were his favorites, which records were most precious to him. Even though we never met, I could tell you in intricate detail about his taste in music. Rather than finding the experience ghoulish, I’ve actually found it quite reassuring: In some ways it’s like a final act of sharing, one collector to another, one fan to another. It helps that we loved the same music, the same records and the same artists.

I feel like a curator keeping the collection alive for a little longer and it’s hard not to think about my own father at the same time, trying to keep him alive as well. My dad also loved jazz, loved collecting records, loved listening to and talking about jazz. He and Irving were of the same generation and there’s a connection that’s hard to ignore. If you think about the jazz fans of that era, born in the 1920s and coming of age during the bebop revolution, you realize that most of the people who experienced it are not with us anymore. I was two years old when Charlie Parker died. Irving was 26, my dad was 29. They saw him live on 52^nd Street, and they saw Art Tatum and Fats Navarro and Clifford Brown. We will soon reach a time when people who were actually there at the conception of the music we love will no longer be around to tell us about it. And that will be a sad day.

As for the collection itself, Irving had it all. More than 100 Blue Notes from the 1500 and 4000 series, early Prestiges, many of the records we talk about here at Jazz Collector, signifying the best of the bop and post-bop eras. The interesting thing was: He didn’t seem to care whether he had original pressings of most of the records: As I mentioned in an earlier post, he had all of the Lee Morgan, Hank Mobley and Jackie McLean Blue Notes, but not an original pressing in the bunch. Same with Dexter Gordon, Horace Silver, Lou Donaldson and other artists. So I now have in my home in The Berkshires a sizeable collection of later-pressing Blue Notes, ranging from Liberties to United Artists to Japanese pressings.

There were, however, some artists that were clearly more important to Irving, and he had a separate cabinet for these artists, not in alphabetical order, just a cabinet unto itself. These were: Clifford Brown, Sonny Rollins, Bud Powell, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Fats Navarro. It was in this cabinet that Irving housed his most precious records and the ones that clearly meant the most to him. There were original pressings on the Blue Note, Emarcy, Savoy, Riverside and Prestige labels by all of these artists. Irving wasn’t obsessive in the sense that he had to have an original pressing of each record – but where he had an original pressing, it was in pristine condition. Obviously, this is what attracted me to the collection, and why I risked the potential wrath of The Lovely Mrs. JC to pursue it.

I can also tell you that Irving was loved by his children, who spoke warmly of him in all of our interactions and treated his passion for jazz with utmost respect. Karen said she remembers times when her father would help her with writing – “he was a wonderful writer,” she said – and she would go downstairs to the basement in their old home and he was always listening to his records. “That was when he was at his most relaxed.” Every Friday evening at the end of the workweek, Irving would trek from Brooklyn into Manhattan in search of records. Gary remembers how much his father loved the music and would share his love of music with anyone he respected. He told me about one time walking in the city with his dad when a man came up to Irving and gave him a big bear hug. “He thanked him for something, I don’t know exactly what, but you could see he liked my dad very much and was very warm to him,” Gary recalled. “When he walked away my dad said he was Sonny Rollins’ cousin and my dad couldn’t even remember what he had done for him. He was just like that.”

It’s odd that I never met Irving because we traveled in the same circles. Perhaps I had seen him at Infinity Records, or at Red Carraro’s house, or at one of the many record shows in New York or Long Island. If we had met under those circumstances perhaps we would have looked at one another suspiciously – competition for the few precious gems we were both seeking. In the end, however, we both shared a bond in our love for jazz, our love for music, our love for the records. And now we share one more thing: Irving’s record collection. Rest in peace, Irving.

If you recall, when Red Carraro died I wrote about him here on Jazz Collector and many friends of Red came here and commented on the site, telling stories and sharing memories. It was very nice and quite cathartic. If you knew Irving and would like to talk about him here, please feel free to post a comment, whether you are a regular Jazz Collector reader or not. And also stay tuned tomorrow for the article Irving wrote about Charlie Parker. It is really quite good.

I will tell you more about Red in a subsequent post, but first let me tell you the story of the first time I met Red. It was back in the early 1970s and I had just started collecting jazz records. I was 19 years old. My good friend from childhood Dan Axelrod had also begun collecting jazz records at the same time and Dan was far more obsessive about it than I was, so he was always finding scores before me. He’d call from Philadelphia or Miami, out of breath, describing beautiful Blue Notes

and yellow-label Prestiges and yellow Norgrans that he had just bought for a dollar apiece. I was always in awe. Then one day Dan called and said he had just found this guy who lived nearby and claimed to have hundreds of rare Verve records in his basement.  We were both into Charlie Parker and Stan Getz and Sonny Stitt and Lester Young and Billie Holliday and, for Dan especially, Tal Farlow, and the idea of hundreds of out-of-print Verves all in one place was, to say the least, quite intriguing and exciting.

Dan said he was going to drive out to this guy’s house and asked if I would like to come along. Sure, I said. There was only one condition: Dan would get to look at all of the records first and he would choose what he wanted and then I would get to choose whatever was left after that. Fine, I said. I was in no position to negotiate. Not only had Dan discovered this guy, but I had no way of getting to his house since I had a broken leg and a full cast and couldn’t drive.

So Dan picked me up and we drove out to Malverne on Long Island, Aberdeen Street, from our garden apartments in Bayside, and soon there was Red Carraro warmly welcoming us at the door with a big smile and a raspy voice, showing us his own jazz collection in the living room, pointing to a few original David Stone Martin drawings on his walls and eventually escorting us downstairs to his basement. I struggled down the steps with my crutches and cast, but, hey, there were hundreds of Verve records down there, all new, many still sealed. Red put a record on the turntable, probably Zoot Sims, and we settled in to look at the records.

It was quite incredible: Boxes of records, mostly Verves, mostly single copies. Dan started attacking the boxes and basically just kept pulling record after record: Stan Getz, Art Tatum, Charlie Parker, Tal Farlow, Sonny Stitt, Lester Young, Flip Phillips, Ben Webster, Johnny Hodges: On and on and on. He must have had a pile of 100 or even 150 records. Then the boxes would come to me and they were nearly empty: Perhaps a couple of Charlie Barnet LPs that didn’t interest Dan, or a Count Basie double, or an Ella that was still available at Sam Goody’s. I remember pulling about 10 or 15 records or so, and I was quite pleased to find those. The price: $5 each. Rare records, many original pressings, most out of print, quite a fair price, even in those days.

I put the pile in front of Red and pulled out my wallet to pay.

“What’s that?” It was Dan, observing my pile.

“These are the records I’m buying.”

“But what’s that?”

Dan was pointing to the record on the top. A Billie Holiday record:  Music For Torching. It had a beautiful yellow and orange cover, with an illustration by David Stone Martin. It was the best record in my pile.

“That’s a Billie Holiday record,” I said.

“You can’t have it,” Dan said.

“What do you mean I can’t have it? You passed on it, and the deal was anything you passed on I could have.”

“But I didn’t mean to pass on it,” Dan said. “I must have missed it.”

“Well,” I said, “sorry, but you’ve got all of those amazing records and I’ve got this little pile and we made a deal and I’m buying this Billie Holiday record.”

“No you’re not,” Dan said.

“Yes I am,” I replied.

It went on like this for a good half hour, best friends arguing futilely over an out-of-print Billie Holiday record with a Stone Martin cover, Red standing there in the middle, smiling but befuddled, not at all knowing what to do as Dan and I eventually began screaming at each other. I was holding the record all this time and I finally pushed the money at Red and paid for the record and put it under my arm, along with the rest of the pile. Dan said something quite obscene to me, grabbed his pile, went up the stairs, got into his car and drove off.  I was still in the basement, with my leg in a cast, 20 miles from home, just me and Red and a bunch of empty boxes that formerly contained most of the Verve jazz catalogue. I looked at Red and smiled. “Oh well,” I said. “I wonder how I’m going to get home.” I then looked at my records, with Music for Torching on the top. I smiled again. I may never make it home, but at least the record was mine.

many duplicate copies of my collectible records. In the days before eBay, there was no simple way of disposing of duplicate copies. You could go to a store or a reputable dealer such as Red Carraro or Fred Cohen, but they would rarely give you what you thought the records were worth. I remember one time having Red come to my home and I had a bunch of really nice duplicates. He picked up a copy of Webster Young, For Lady, Prestige 7106. It was in beautiful condition. This was in the mid 1980s.

“Whaddya think, Red?” I asked.

“Nice record,” he replied. “I’ll give you ten bucks for it.”

I loved Red, but I was not selling him For Lady for ten bucks. At that point I decided I’d rather keep my duplicates and even take them to the grave with me, rather than give them away for nothing. But there was an alternative: Record Shows. I could clean them up, price them up, pack them up and put them on a table in a hall and sell them to other collectors. So, for a while, I did that, hauling my boxes of records into Manhattan and, for these Record Bashes, all the way to the wilds of Jersey.

So the first year I did the Jersey gig, I was one of the first to arrive: I figured, hey if I’m hauling all the way to Jersey I may as well see if there are records to buy. And, indeed, there were: After I was there for about an hour, the guy with the table next to me arrived.

“I guess I’m here,” he said. “Yup,” I replied. “Can I help you out?”

He said he was going to go out and bring his records in and as he was loading, could I watch his records. “Sure,” I said. “Mind If I look at them?” He replied: “Sure.”

This was a guy who had never sold records before. He was getting rid of his records to help pay for his kids’ college tuition. He had no idea what the records were worth, so he priced everything the same: Five bucks a record. I started going through the records. What he had that was nice and compelling, was a great collection of Prestige Swingville Records, all in pristine mint condition. There were records by Al Sears and Jimmy Hamilton and Claude Hopkins and Coleman Hawkins. I took them all, plus a beautiful 10-inch Sonny Criss on Mercury and a few Lester Youngs on Norgran.

It was quite a nice little score and I remember Red Carraro stopping by afterwards. “Whaddya got there?” he asked. I showed him the records. “Pretty nice,” he said. “I’ll give you five bucks apiece for them.” Gotta love Red for trying.

Anyway, this gathering is going on now and I will make an effort to re-arrange my schedule and pop over there sometime today. If I do, I’ll give you a report tomorrow on the site. If not and if any of our readers is over there and would like to tell us about it, please feel free to write a comment on this post.