Teasing the Korean

That CD omitted all 12 tunes that had comprised Shorty Courts the Count, and RCA released that title separately. So at least there was a method to the madness. That would make sense. They would have recently been compiled and re-mastered, so much of the work for the CD had already been done. I never stopped buying LPs. CDs were more of a way to complement the LPs. And because LPS were so incredibly cheap and ubiquitous in the 1990s, vinyl was my main focus. But I would still buy the occasional CD if the price was right and I could not find it on LP.

If you lead a busy life, come home with a haul of 50 LPs for a buck a piece, all of which need to be cleaned, you may not get to half of them before you bring home the next haul of 50 buck-a-piece LPs. For years, I rarely had time to listen to LPs during the week. I would spin them on the weekends, and even some weekends were so busy that I couldn't play many. So it makes perfect sense to someone in my situation. I should add that, for more than 20 years, I have been fortunate to have jobs that allow me to listen to music all day at my desk. So between CDs and Pandora, I hear plenty of music between 9 and 5. I don't need to hear an LP right away when I get home.

I've been thinking about the early years of CDs and how much of the back catalog - jazz and beyond - was and was not available. The first jazz CDs I remember seeing were the Columbia blockbusters repackaged with the hideous blue border. As if it wasn't enough to shrink the LP covers to CD size, they had to make them even smaller with that needless margin? These albums would include Kind of Blue, Mingus Ah-Um, and Time Out. I also remember Polygram's Compact Jazz series for artists on Verve, Mercury, MPS, and related. I suspect that some of these releases may have predated reissues of many of the actual albums from which the collections were drawn? Or not? It seems like OJC had made quite a bit of their back catalog available on CD by 1989 or 1990. And there was that early run of Blue Note albums, with no bonus tracks and cheap looking graphics. I also remember a time when certain artists were very underrepresented on CD. And, of course, there are still many jazz albums that never made the transition, at least until the EU public domain thing kicked in. Interestingly, I did not get a CD player until around 1992, but I remember browsing the bins for many years to see what I could or could not buy. What do you remember about this time?

Safety first!

It is indeed I, dawg. I'll post my listening room later. And my Hank Mobley and Three Suns albums live together in perfect bliss. It may be an optical delusion. There is one empty cube next to the Esquivel head. And the ceiling is sloped. EDIT: Oh, I see what you mean. That cube in the center. That is where the RCA Stereo Action albums are filed. They are taller, so I adjusted the center shelf. (Each shelving section fits LPs two high, with an adjustable center shelf.)

I believe so. No, that is a chimp. I consider myself a gorilla.

That's Tippy, mother of Chip and wife of Zip. Forget the manufacturer.

Here is a better picture:

They are these lightweight blocks a little bigger than a brick, used for various yoga and pilates exercises. The are of a strong rubbery material, but with enough pliability that I was able to wedge a few of them in the space between the bowed shelving and the adjacent wall. They held everything in place until I was able to hit a hardware store and install the brackets. Quick thinking on my part - I don't know what made me think to use them.

Home Depot sells - or used to sell - these modular units that stack using a little pin in each corner. That's what these are. I anchored them into the wall at the studs, top to bottom. I also put in side brackets on one side, and screwed them together horizontally from one unit to the next. I suspect that these are pretty secure.

You are correct. Although the original picture looks like this, so the aspect ratio distortion must have occurred before posting. Now, in my previous place, the shelving did indeed start to buckle, and with quick thinking, I used some yoga bricks to keep them in place until I could put up brackets. I took my time installing these shelves properly, after that experience!

The occasion vinyl you see along the way are genre dividers. We will used trashed thrift store LPs and write the genre name on them with a silver marker.

Here is the record room, but it does not show the full width of the shelves:

Do we need third-party hosting, or can we post pics directly from our computers?

I was always afraid to count or estimate. The shelving is more than that 13 feet long, floor to (high) ceiling. I need a ladder for the top two rows. I organize with some idiosyncratic genres, but I would say that the vast majority of my accumulation is jazz/jazz-related and film scores. Also lots of classical, Latin, Brazilian, Moog/electronic, now sound, jazz/pop vocals, space-age bachelor pad, exotica, outer space, gothic/macabre/supernatural, crime/spy, French, eastern and middle-eastern. I can't begin to estimate the number of CDs. Years ago, I ditched jewel cases for many titles and opted for thin sleeves, so I can't do simple multiplication based on numbers of jewel cases. Yes, I hate to sound like I am either gloating to people who understand, or to appear insane to people who don't. My wife, fortunately, shares my love of music and had a large collection when we got together. In the 1990s, we were dirt poor, but we were living like a king and queen bringing home all these dollar LPs! We picked up a lot of great tips over the years. One of my favorites came from Poison Ivy and Lux Interior of the Cramps: Go to a record show, go straight to the Beatles/Elvis dealer, and ask to look through the box of non-Elvis/non-Beatles. You always find something amazing that is completely off their radar!

I accumulated a lot of LPs throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. This was when everyone was unloading LPs and they were dirt cheap. I would bring home a huge haul of LPs, clean the ones that I couldn't wait to hear, and place the others in the "to be cleaned" section, which eventually spilled onto the floor when I ran out of shelving. I would then bring home another haul, so the unplayed LPs from the previous would end up further back in the stack. The record room eventually became very unwieldy. I moved a little over a year ago, and now have a much bigger record room. All of the LPs now fit on the shelving, and I arranged the unplayed LPs in a manner which allows them to easily be integrated into the main sections without a lot of reorganizing. I realized when I moved all those CDs and LPs that my accumulation may be bordering on obsession, and I made a conscious decision to simply stop buying music and enjoy the records I have. There have been exceptions - The expanded Erroll Garner Concert by the Sea, Monk's Dangerous Liaisons, the recently discovered Coltrane - but these are the exceptions and not the rule. Every weekend, I've been giving all these jazz LPs a scrub on the Nitty Gritty and enjoying them with an Old Fashioned or two; or a glass of wine or three. I feel like I am still still shopping for music, because there is always new stuff to play. I always imagined a day when I would have a room like this and finally get around to enjoying all the stuff that I was obsessively bringing home for so many years. Now it's here.

There is an art to sequencing an album. This was lost on the compilers of these albums.

Agree. It's the poorly sequenced LPs that bug me; hence, my starting the thread to begin with.

There have been a number of posthumous albums, most live, that IMO comprise a very important piece of the catalog, in particular the 2-CD Dream Letter collection, which finds him in Happy/Sad/Blue Afternoon territory. Live from the Troubador is closer to Lorca. There is another disc (whose title escapes me) from around the time of Goodbye and Hello, just Tim and his guitar. Finally, a Rhino Handmade collection has some outtakes from Happy/Sad, including a studio version of "Song to the Siren" that is closer in arrangement to that on his Monkees TV performance than to Starsailor.

Well, as part of the jazz audience, I was not interested in such presentations, and I waited until these kinds of albums hit the dollar bin before I picked them up. I might have paid full price if the music was artistically organized. So, there is no one-size-fits-all approach with jazz. There's hardly anyone buying the records as it is.

Let's substitute "casual" with "non-academic, non analytical." Does that help?

How casual can I get? Not notice that I'm hearing the same song five times in a row?

Am I the only one who hates these? I've accumulated a number of Savoy twofers (and others) in which all of the alternate takes - sometimes as many as five - will be presented in a row. It is impossible to enjoy these albums for casual listening. At least with a CD, you can program what you want. Why don't they vary the alternate takes, and put the master takes together for a listening experience? Oh well, at these prices, I shouldn't complain.

The right hand two-voice harmonizing where he goes from 6ths to 5ths to thirds is very much a Guaraldi trademark.

TIM BUCKLEY!!!! GYPSY WOMAN!!!