Hot Ptah

PM sent on the above. How much for the Art Farmer, Dan? Lucky you Noj, if you have not heard those Sonny Clarks and will be experiencing them for the first time!

I already have this one, and very strongly recommend it: Benny Carter--A Gentleman and His Music. I am surprised to see that it has not sold. It is an album which gets a lot of regular play at my house.

Another visit to the $1 per album liquidation sale of Kansas City's Music Exchange. The auction company running the sale put out another 100,000 albums, which had been in storage. They included a stack of between 10 and 20 of those Art Tatum albums reissued by Pablo, with the black and white covers, the Solo Masterpieces. They were all still sealed. I left those as I have them all already. I did pick up about 30 more albums, by Gerald Wiggins, Arthur Blythe, Kidd Jordan and the Improvisational Arts Quartet, Red Norvo, Jay Hoggard, Herbie Mann, Herbie Mann and Sam Most, Lew Tabackin, Plas Johnson, J.J. Johnson, Isham Jones, Bob Brookmeyer, Mongo Santamaria, Rob McConnell with Phil Woods, Bill Evans, Milt Jackson, Stuff Smith, Hot Lips Page, Wayne Shorter, Arnie Lawrence, Jane Ira Bloom, Stanley Turrentine and Shirley Scott, Dave Brubeck, Oscar Peterson trio on Pablo, bluesman Lonnie Brooks, Benny Goodman, Jimmy Owens, and a Verve compilation of pianists (Bud Powell/Cecil Taylor/Mary Lou Williams/Wynton Kelly/Bill Evans/Paul Bley). This is a fun sale to go to, despite the heat inside, which can be uncomfortablem unless you are standing in one of the prized spots where the free standing fans are blowing some air.

"Some call me Mister Ra Some call me Mister Ree You can call me Mr. Mystery" I have bought a lot of jazz CDs and LPs from three different people who were in your position and disposed of their large collections on ebay in the past few years. If you PM me, I will tell you how to email them. My impression is that they found it to be a lot of work, but that they enjoyed aspects of it. They would probably not mind discussing their experiences with you. I have thought about what I would do with my collection as well, when I am a bit older, and I made some informal inquiries. I found that schools at all levels, and libraries, don't want it. Charities don't want it. No one wants it! Used music store owners have told me that when a large collection comes to them, the "game" is to get the owner, or if the owner is dead, the family, to pay THEM, the music store, to cart it away from their property. The music stores try to pay nothing for the collection, or a pittance at most. It's not an easy situation. I have thought that this was a business opportunity for someone on this board, to set up a business to sell other member's collections when they died or just wanted to sell them. Also, I wonder how many used music stores have been initially established to sell off one large collection. That is another option, with its own headaches, I am sure.

Speaking of being a pack rat, how about my collection (which I just moved from one house to another) of all of the Down Beat magazines from 1976 to the present, and Radio Free Jazz, later known as Jazz Times, from 1978 to the present? Why am I keeping them? I wish both magazines would put their entire contents on a CD, like The New Yorker, so that I would have a much more compact item that I never look at.

I really appreciate the consistency of the album. Right now my favorite cuts are the last three on the CD.

Ha! Dream on! My 12 year old daughter thinks that ALL of my music "stinks". She likes the soundtrack of her life, recorded by people close to her own age. And so it goes, forevermore. I have concluded for myself only, that as long as I have storage space and feel like keeping old recorded non-jazz music, I will. There is no real way to "make money off of it," except for the odd rarity I somehow managed to accidentally keep in good condition. What surprised me a little bit is that when I decided to try to donate my old non-jazz vinyl to worthy organizations for the less fortunate, they had absolutely no interest in receiving it. That IS surprising! Bizarre, if you ask me. There must be someone who would enjoy this stuff (besides us in our younger days). Actually, I have found that older and younger people do not "enjoy this stuff" much. Even albums like "Tommy" and "Deja Vu" seem to elict yawns and shouts of "turn that garbage off" from my daughter's friends. Just as I could not "hear" my parents' early 1950s showtunes albums, although they were most likely of real merit, younger people cannot "hear" our "stuff." Of course, there is always the odd exception, the current 15 year old nerd who gets into World War II battles, 1950s Presidential campaign buttons and late 1960s rock, but there aren't very many of them, I think. Not even the Stones merit a listen? Dylan? Ry Cooder? Young people today! My experience, which may not be universal, is that "the young people of today" are as eager to listen to the Stones, Dylan or Ry Cooder as I was, at age 14 in 1970, to listen to Benny Goodman. Not at all. It's more of the sound of the music--it's not THEIR SOUND. Hannah Montana is THEIR SOUND. Other current groups and singers are THEIR SOUND. If you try to tell them that the Stones are objectively better than Hannah Montana, you sound like a 50 year old in 1969 railing against that awful rock and roll noise--"we had Glenn Miller when I was growing up, that was real music, not these....these...animals with their screaming and screechy guitars, it sounds like they are pulling a cat's tail. Now Jimmy Dorsey, that was music!"

There have been online threads before in jazz forums about donating vinyl to libraries. The overall conclusion in those threads is that libraries don't want it either, usually. Often your collection ends up getting sold for a ridiculously low price at the library's annual fundraiser. If you have a lot of vinyl, it's stuck to you like zebra mussels.

Ha! Dream on! My 12 year old daughter thinks that ALL of my music "stinks". She likes the soundtrack of her life, recorded by people close to her own age. And so it goes, forevermore. I have concluded for myself only, that as long as I have storage space and feel like keeping old recorded non-jazz music, I will. There is no real way to "make money off of it," except for the odd rarity I somehow managed to accidentally keep in good condition. What surprised me a little bit is that when I decided to try to donate my old non-jazz vinyl to worthy organizations for the less fortunate, they had absolutely no interest in receiving it. That IS surprising! Bizarre, if you ask me. There must be someone who would enjoy this stuff (besides us in our younger days). Actually, I have found that older and younger people do not "enjoy this stuff" much. Even albums like "Tommy" and "Deja Vu" seem to elict yawns and shouts of "turn that garbage off" from my daughter's friends. Just as I could not "hear" my parents' early 1950s showtunes albums, although they were most likely of real merit, younger people cannot "hear" our "stuff." Of course, there is always the odd exception, the current 15 year old nerd who gets into World War II battles, 1950s Presidential campaign buttons and late 1960s rock, but there aren't very many of them, I think.

O.K., I have to admit that I am not sure that it is a man holding the moderately large hat at the right side of the cover. But I just had to post this cover! What an amazing cultural artifact, the collision of two very different worlds:

I have received mine, have been playing it in the car, and like every cut a lot! Great album!

Ha! Dream on! My 12 year old daughter thinks that ALL of my music "stinks". She likes the soundtrack of her life, recorded by people close to her own age. And so it goes, forevermore. I have concluded for myself only, that as long as I have storage space and feel like keeping old recorded non-jazz music, I will. There is no real way to "make money off of it," except for the odd rarity I somehow managed to accidentally keep in good condition. What surprised me a little bit is that when I decided to try to donate my old non-jazz vinyl to worthy organizations for the less fortunate, they had absolutely no interest in receiving it.

As the father of a severely disabled son, I don't find this cover tasteless. I applaud efforts to make the disabled more a part of mainstream society, to stop keeping them hidden from sight because it might make the non-disabled feel "icky." She looks happy and apparently plays well, at least well enough to produce music for a full length LP. I am glad that she got to do her own album. I could do without the "miracle from God" language. If there is one thing that is tiresome, it is when the non-disabled come up to us with a gushy voice and say that our disabled son must be "a gift from God" or that "God only sends these children to people who He knows can take care of them." That is absolutely untrue, as many of the children are born to parents who abandon or abuse or neglect them, but it is also such a phony sentiment.

Here is another album cover showing its own album cover. As the album cover she is holding also shows the same album cover, I guess that process goes on into infinity, like the Pink Floyd "Ummagumma" album cover posted earlier in this thread. This album, about Gold Bond Ceiling Tile, was released on Columbia Records, in its Special Products line: