Let me start this new adventure with a post from Jazz Collector from Sept. 29, 2009. I had the audacity to call it The Great Jazz Vinyl Countdown, and this an abridged version of how it began:

“I counted my records the other day. At least I counted most of them. I have more records than I want. I have them in four separate rooms in two separate homes. I have records I have owned for more than 25 years and have never put on a turntable. I have records by artists I don’t especially like. I have collected them because I am a collector. It’s what I do. That is why my site is called Jazz Collector.

“I counted the records because I have made a fairly momentous decision, and that decision is this: I am going to get rid of many of them. This is heresy, is it not? These are my friends, all hand selected personally by me. I have invited them into my home, to share my space, to give me comfort and joy in times of stress or sorrow. And they have served me well, all of them, in whatever way they could. But the time has come to part with many of them.”

As I said at the time, this was a fairly momentous decision.

I don’t think it lasted more than a few days. I either didn’t want to do it or simply couldn’t do it. Whatever the reason, there never really was a Great Jazz Vinyl Countdown here at Jazz Collector. In fact, I went in the opposite direction. Within two weeks of that post, I sold 12 records and bought 300. I had a net gain of 288 records: “At the rate I’m going,” I wrote at the time, “in three years I’ll have half a million records and I’ll be living in a straitjacket.”

Less than three years later, I purchased the Irvin Kalus collection, about 2,500 records in all. A year and a half later, I purchased the Bruce M. West collection, about 1,500 vinyl, plus a few hundred 78s. There’s collection here in my neighborhood that I first saw more than five years ago. I’m still pursuing it.

Instead of shrinking, the collection has grown in both quality and quantity in the 13-plus years since the beginning of The Great Jazz Vinyl Countdown. I love hunting for and buying records. Been doing it since I can remember. It’s been a major part of my life. People know me as a jazz collector. You all know me as Jazz Collector. It’s an important part of my identity.

But . . . .

Obviously, the idea of paring the collection down has been on my mind for a while, at least since Sept. 29, 2009. Why did I finally decide to act on it now, and how did about 700 of my records end up in Durham, North Carolina with Carolina Soul Records? Stay tuned.

“You know I saw that record collection today,” I said, quite casually.

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “Anything of interest?”

“Yes, it was pretty interesting,” I said.

We sat in silence for a few seconds.

“There’s a chance I may be buying it,” I finally said.

She stared at me in stunned disbelief.

“How many?”

I smiled a sheepish smile and held up three fingers.

Her eyes popped out of her head. “Three hundred records! How can you buy three hundred more records!”

I shook my head no. I said it wasn’t three hundred. She smiled a smile of instant relief.

“Three records. That’s fine.”

I shook my head no again.

Her face turned an ashen white. She pushed the words out softly, as if they were pure evil and should have never been voiced aloud by any human being. “Three thousand records.” It was barely a whisper. The words just sat there between us. Her face went from white to green. She looked physically ill. She couldn’t swallow and her breathing tightened markedly. “You’re not serious, are you?”

Now I should explain something, lest you reach the mistaken conclusion that The Lovely Mrs. JC is anything but a wonderful and supportive spouse. About a year ago we decided to sell our home in Great Neck and downsize and get rid of many, many things that were deemed unessential. The Lovely Mrs. JC rid herself of hundreds of books and some artwork that she had treasured and I vowed to shrink my record collection, not only through the now mythical Great Jazz Vinyl Countdown, but through selling records on eBay and even donating records to charity. Last year, in fact, I sold 500 records at a garage sale for $1 apiece and donated 1,500 more to the ARChive of Contemporary Music. This was huge progress in the interest of matrimonial compromise and bliss.

However, since then I had done nothing to downsize and, in fact, had purchased two more collections and had custom cabinets built in our Berkshires home to accommodate several thousand records. In fact, I had recently designed new cabinets with my builder that were to be installed the following week, allowing me to get records out of storage and have space for yet another full roomful of records on the order of at least 2,500 or so.

As the color of her face went from white to green to white again and then starting recapturing its normal pinkish hue, The Lovely Mrs. JC asked me what I intended to do with these 3,000 records. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that it was really about 50 or so records that I cherished, that I wasn’t even sure what was in the entire collection. But I had thought about what to do with the records and it was a strange conclusion I had drawn that was completely unexpected to me. I wanted to keep the collection intact for a while, to just have it and pore through it and play with it and play the records, without thought to whether or how or when to sell the duplicates. For some odd reason I felt respectful to the owner of the records, whom I had probably never even met, and wanted to honor him in some way by keeping his collection alive. I have a feeling it had something to do with my own father, who passed away about 15 years ago: Knowing how much my dad treasured his records and how much it meant to him to build up his own collection and how each record he purchased meant something special to him. It seemed kind of odd, but for some reason felt natural. It was what I would have wanted for my own dad, I guess. In any case, The Lovely Mrs. JC was suddenly sympathetic to the situation.

“You know those record shelves you are building in the country,” she said. “If you buy the collection, you could put the records there.”

Brilliant. Hadn’t even thought of it myself.

So the potential obstacle of The Lovely Mrs. JC was now overcome and her support was in hand. And now I knew what I would be doing with the records if I were to purchase them. Next I just needed to get the OK from the owners of the records. Which turned out to be not as easy as it may have seemed.

Stay tuned for Part 6