Booking

Sorry, yet again, for the long gap between posts. Been very busy around here. Plus, my computer crashed for a few days. Very disconcerting, when you are wondering whether you are going to be able to recover all of your files and settings, which I was able to do, fortunately, with tremendous online support from Apple. Now that we’re safely back in action, let’s catch up on some of the stuff we were watching on eBay before we were so rudely interrupted, starting with Booker Ervin, Groovin’ High, Prestige 7147. This was an original blue label mono pressing that was part of the Jazz Record Center auction we were watching. The record and cover looked to be in M- condition and the final price was $360, which was a new high for this record, according to Popsike.  I am somewhat surprised to see the demand for these blue label Prestiges to have increased so much in the past few years, but I am also pleased to see it for a player like Booker Ervin, who, in my view, is quite underrated and always produced some very nice records. Read more

24 Hours on Ebay

TatumI spent 24 hours on eBay. Well, not really. What I did was I looked at 24 consecutive hours worth of jazz records listed on eBay. I used to do this every single day, particularly when I was active buying and selling. But it’s not the way I look anymore. It was kind of fun. I put a few records in my watch list, which I will share momentarily, and I even bid on a couple of records, which will be the subject of another post. The thing that was most striking was the staggering percentage of records listed on eBay that just will not sell. This is primarily because there is no market for them, but there are others priced so ridiculously out of sync with the market that the seller is just wasting his time and money listing them. What is it, 90% of the records won’t get any bids? That’s my guess. It would be interesting if someone spent some time and did a study.

Anyway, here are a few that either closed earlier or are closing soon, starting with Art Tatum. Benny Carter, Louis Bellson, Clef 55. This was an original pressing with a nice cover by David Stone Martin. There’s really very little interest in Tatum these days, which I will never understand, so I wanted to watch this and see if it would sell. It did, for $42.12 in Ex condition for the record and the cover, VG+ in my language.

These next two surprised me. They are not records I normally watch because they don’t typically fetch collectible prices. They didn’t here, but they also sold for more money than I would have expected:

Read more

Hot Records, High Prices

Back home after a weekend away. Let’s see what happened on eBay the past few days.

 The seller JBLD44000 out of Seattle, who has been selling some nice records the past few weeks, had a bunch of items up this weekend, with mixed results. A few of the records sold for high prices, including:

Hank Mobley, Soul Station, Blue Note 4031, for $1,337.28

Kenny Drew, Walkin’ and Talkin’, Jazz West 4, for $532

This dealer also had several high-ticket items that didn’t get bids at all. Based on our previous experience watching his auctions, we anticipate that these records will be back on eBay in the near future with somewhat lower start prices and, perhaps, Buy-It-Now prices. Among those records are: Read more