I think I've reached a turning point

[jazzbo]

Playing music always makes me want to hear new music. I've been playing guitar this last year more than anything and it's moved me toward new guitar sounds and players and music. When I pick up the bass, the same. Piano, drums, the same.

I need music in my head. It's become a big part of my "self-talk"--how I interact with worlds inner and outer. And I need to feed the need. I have the need to feed. I think as long as I have coins to rub together I'll be seeking out new recordings. Less so the "social things." I've sort of happily retired from the social life.

[kh1958]

The best way to find new artists (or to revive your interests in older but still living artists) is to hear live music. Since you live in Dallas/Fort Worth, this is rarely possible. So the solution is to travel to a jazz festival, or go to New York City (a jazz festival is in pregress there 365 days of the year).

Or else get high as a mf and listen to the sounds in your head. :g :g

Legally of course!

What if the sounds in your head while high are an amalgamation of The Carpenters and Guy Lombardo?

[Hot Ptah]

I love to shop for more CDs and vinyl as much as ever. I have the most fun browsing in physical brick and mortar stores. I have noticed that more and more, I say to myself, wow, this place has a surprisingly good selection--I have all of it, but it is a surprisingly good selection.

But somehow I still manage to find a lot of stuff to buy.

I try to buy everything at a deep discount now. I try not to buy several albums at a time, at full price, which I used to do regularly.

With the economic downturn, I find that the used stores have a great deal more inventory than they had two years ago. It's become more and more fun to shop at them.

Edited July 16, 2009 by Hot Ptah

[JSngry]

The best way to find new artists (or to revive your interests in older but still living artists) is to hear live music. Since you live in Dallas/Fort Worth, this is rarely possible. So the solution is to travel to a jazz festival, or go to New York City (a jazz festival is in pregress there 365 days of the year).

Or else get high as a mf and listen to the sounds in your head. :g :g

Legally of course!

What if the sounds in your head while high are an amalgamation of The Carpenters and Guy Lombardo?

then you go with that and make it what you need it to be!

[Aggie87]

With the economic downturn, I find that the used stores have a great deal more inventory than they had two years ago. It's become more and more fun to shop at them.

You're lucky to have used stores.

There are two remaining in my town - half price books, and one indy place. Neither have the greatest selection. I would think since everyone else is going to digital music, that people would be dumping CDs left and right. In theory I guess that's happening, but I still don't see very much worthwhile titles to pick up.

[Hot Ptah]

The best way to find new artists (or to revive your interests in older but still living artists) is to hear live music. Since you live in Dallas/Fort Worth, this is rarely possible. So the solution is to travel to a jazz festival, or go to New York City (a jazz festival is in pregress there 365 days of the year).

Or else get high as a mf and listen to the sounds in your head. :g :g

Legally of course!

What if the sounds in your head while high are an amalgamation of The Carpenters and Guy Lombardo?

Then you will be happy in thrift stores. As the albums will sell for $1.00 or less, you can greatly expand the number of your purchases.

[clifford_thornton]

I'm a broke record addict & I review new discs, so for me there's always a slew of things to listen to. I basically just don't have time to listen to it all and digest it.

Add that to a love for 60s/70s rock, punk, American steel-string guitar music, and sprechstimmung and you could say I have a problem.

That said: I battle depression and in those bleak times, I find it hard to listen to ANYthing, even the hum of the A/C. That is the only time when I "tire" of music or need silence/freedom from unopened boxed sets.

[kh1958]

The best way to find new artists (or to revive your interests in older but still living artists) is to hear live music. Since you live in Dallas/Fort Worth, this is rarely possible. So the solution is to travel to a jazz festival, or go to New York City (a jazz festival is in pregress there 365 days of the year).

Or else get high as a mf and listen to the sounds in your head. :g :g

Legally of course!

What if the sounds in your head while high are an amalgamation of The Carpenters and Guy Lombardo?

Then you will be happy in thrift stores. As the albums will sell for $1.00 or less, you can greatly expand the number of your purchases.

That would be when I know I need to seek help, when I start assembling the Record Collection from Hell. (I still have my Iron Butterfly record, so I already have a good start.)

[papsrus]

Don't mean to be overly dramatic, but ...

I guess I'm lucky in a way that I didn't really embrace jazz, or any kind of music for that matter, with any degree of passion until I hit my mid-40s. Now, in my early 50s, I'm still very much in the discovery stage. Still connecting the dots. Still marveling at the genius of the music. The stories. The history. New discoveries and "ah-ha!" moments come with great regularity, for me. And I'm thankful for that.

I like to think those moments are available to everyone, no matter their familiarity with the music.

But I go through periods where none of the music on my shelves seems to inspire me, just like anyone else. I don't have to be inspired by it to listen to it, though. It can be simply a comfortable friend, at times. I'm OK with that. Other times, I will sit, eyes closed, volume up, absorbing as best I can the amazing wizardry of a Clifford Brown, or Bird, or Ellington, and it can be overwhelming. I'm pretty sure everyone here knows that feeling.

"Nourishment" is the term that comes to mind. Having been parched for so long, the music now provides me with great nourishment. And so I drink mightily from the trough. Five new discs arrived today. ... Bartender!

[sidewinder]

I guess I'm lucky that I can still happily spin jazz LPs and enjoy the listen and get new things from it, something I've been doing decades ago since I was 14 or 15 and first got the bug. I started off as a modernist only but in recent years have been reverting a bit to my 'inner traditionalist'. The only time I just can't listen to any jazz is when I'm under the weather with a bug, and like Clifford mentioned, I find that any kind of sound (even cars or aircraft outside) then becomes a real problem. Occasionally after a binge of listening or several days at a Jazz Festival over-saturation fatigue kicks in - good thing then to take a bit of a break and ease yourself back into the listening gradually.

One things for sure - will never tire of spinning LPs on Blue Note/Savoy/Impulse/Prestige/Mosaic etc. Even from my zimmer frame.

[Jazzmoose]

The best way to find new artists (or to revive your interests in older but still living artists) is to hear live music. Since you live in Dallas/Fort Worth, this is rarely possible. So the solution is to travel to a jazz festival, or go to New York City (a jazz festival is in pregress there 365 days of the year).

Or else get high as a mf and listen to the sounds in your head. :g :g

Legally of course!

What if the sounds in your head while high are an amalgamation of The Carpenters and Guy Lombardo?

Stop doing Robitussin.

[Chuck Nessa]

Why does Big Al hate music?

[captainwrong]

I've been collecting records since I was 5. It's been almost 30 years now. Ironically, just about the time I started hearing "vinyl is back," I was starting to lose interest in collecting music in any form. For me, it was a combination of two things First off, I had a radio show for three years where every week I'd have, on average, an entire mail tub full of CDs to try to process by the next week. Some of it was great, some terrible, but I never had time to enjoy any of it, let alone get anything for my own pleasure.

The second factor was having to move my collection. Packing stuff up, I had to come to terms with the amount of stuff I was hanging on to that I'd never listened to or never would again and it just didn't make any sense to keep it. I ditched maybe 40% of my records, probably 60%+ of my CDs and still have more stuff than any normal person should.

I still buy stuff from time to time, more out of habit than anything else. At least I'm back to being able to listen to stuff again. Doing the radio show, I just got so burnt out. I'm still pretty reluctant to add anything to my collection. Not saying I haven't, but it's got to be pretty exceptional stuff.

[Tom Storer]

It's not unusual for enthusiasms to wax and wane. Sometimes you need air, that's all. If you've been obsessive for decades and find yourself losing interest, that doesn't mean that after a while it won't kick in again. Take up some other hobby for a while!

Personally, I've never been a collector, just a random accumulator. I still trundle on buying 1, 2 or 3 CDs a month, plus my 40 tracks on eMusic. There are times when I feel like that's more than enough, and times I burn for more. Just ride the waves and troughs...

[AndrewHill]

It's not unusual for enthusiasms to wax and wane. Sometimes you need air, that's all. If you've been obsessive for decades and find yourself losing interest, that doesn't mean that after a while it won't kick in again. Take up some other hobby for a while!

This essentially sums up what I go through.

[andybleaden]

Well I have not been doing anything jazz wize at all for years. Have not bought anything since they released some Rare grooves of the Three Sounds last year/maybe the year before

In all honesty I have also been not even doing much on here either. I guess I have stuck to my plan to get back to my favourites and start enjoying them all over again.

Most of my listening now is of my just about fully ripped Blue Note cd collection ( which I still keep to listen to when I want) via my Mp3 player on constant random play .....it has bought me much more pleasure than I anticipated and has reminded me of why I fell in love with Blue Note records.

I have not been looking in sales/checking on ebay or anything as I think for now at least I have what I want.

Maybe that will change although my next plan is to start to repeat what I have done with my Blue Notes to all my other jazz and ECM collection...will need more players though!

However I have had this before but refound my interest as it was way back when I decided to flog my LPs and found that many of them were now being released in Japan on CD.

My overall perspective is that my collection is something I spent time and effort on creating and building and I want to actually listen to it and enjoy it too.

[Jazzmoose]

The second factor was having to move my collection. Packing stuff up...

Yeah, that can cure a lot of packratism, at least temporarily.

[Big Beat Steve]

It's not unusual for enthusiasms to wax and wane. Sometimes you need air, that's all. If you've been obsessive for decades and find yourself losing interest, that doesn't mean that after a while it won't kick in again. Take up some other hobby for a while!

This essentially sums up what I go through.

Well, I DO have another (time and money-consuming) collecting hobby, and both (that one and my collection of records and assorted matters musical - books, mags, etc.) have been going on for 30+ years, and of course there have always been times when one hobby took a back step vs the other, but these phases have always alternated relatively regularly and none of the two interests have ever abated completely).

And yet ...

... in the past it was unthinkable for me NOT to get home and put a record on the turntable as soon as I had some time to spend within listening distance of the speakers. Now it does happen (and not all that rarely) that at the end of an evening I wonder "hey, you haven't even listened to any music from your collection all day long",

... in the past I used to actively and constantly search out record stores for records of interest (even if no purchases were made, I just had to keep abreast of what potential items of interest there were), and now - though such browsing ought to be even easier in the WWW - I just do not feel that same urge anymore, at least not on any constant basis,

... despite the vast array of items theoretically available you get choosier and choosier, so the Wants lists do take longer to accumulate (if at all).

etc. etc.

Anyway, last night I finally sent off that Amazon order for some 10 more CDs (including two box sets, some of them on the strength of topics here), but did it take long to make up my mind about some of the items ...

In short, my music collecting interest certainly isn't gone but somehow the ultimate collecting and completist urge has been absent for quite a while. And this despite the ever-increasing awareness of the flood of (re-)releases everywhere as well as of the music that exists/existed in your favorite areas.

So am I one of those who really has reached the point of having "enough music" or what's up?? ;)

Edited July 17, 2009 by Big Beat Steve

[brownie]

No turning back for me!

The enjoyment of music has never been a hobby to me, but a passion.

I thought years ago that when I would retire I would stop buying new items and just keep my listening time to what I already have.

But I continue to look for so many items and discover/rediscover the full extent of the music. How beautifully exciting to be able to listen to Johnny Dodds, then Ruby Braff, Warne Marsh before checking some Sun Ra. It never stops. And I don't want it to stop.

[king ubu]

The enjoyment of music has never been a hobby to me, but a passion.

... It never stops. And I don't want it to stop.

That's how it's been for me, since I was around 13 or 14, and I hope it will go on like that for a while!

[Niko]

had some years where i hardly listened to music at all and bought just five or six cds a year (21 to 24 or so) but at present there's still so much to discover i can hardly imagine it will ever end because i've heard it all (rather because i lose interest...) i feel my listening is still far from reaching any type of equilibrium (at only 28 but after having heard much more music than other people in their entire lifes ) not only the styles of jazz that interest me change every few months with little interests that really remain constant for more than a year... it's also my listening, like at the moment i rediscover the joys of listening to the same music again and again - something i had pretty much lost in the last few years... my buying has luckily gone back a bit due to deezer and the other free listening services (an idea i like much better than downloads) but this has allowed me to listen to music i had never heard for almost every day this year - and there's still so much i'd like to have time for but didn't get around to so far...

[A Lark Ascending]

I love having a big collection accumulated over 37 years to enjoy and re-explore.

But the biggest thrill for me is still discovering something new...I'm forever in search of the buzz I got at 16 when it was all new. The thrill dosen't come so often but it's still regular enough.

I don't get jaded with what I've got because I just change genre regularly. A month or so of electric Miles might mutate into a rediscovery of Irish folk or turn of the century Germanic orchestral music.

There's so much out there still unexplored...new music as yet unplayed (and originating from places that are not usually associated with the standard jazz historical canon), and old music that I've not heard and is equally foreign.

Can't see me losing the love of music for a long time yet.

[blind-blake]

I recently discovered classical music. Luckily, there is ton of stuff for cheap (or free).

[Peter Friedman]

Brownie said it perfectly for me when he said that music was not a hobby, but a passion. I began collecting jazz recordings back in the mid-1950's and have never stopped. Over the years I have branched out into blues and classical music too, though jazz is my first and greatest love. I have close to zero interest in any form of rock, pop, country or world music .

I did make the switch from 45's to LPs, and eventually to CDs back in the mid-1980's and now have a very large collection My acquisition rate has slowed down a bit as there are fewer things being released that appeal to me.

Nonetheless, I am always on the lookout for new releases or reissues that do fit into my areas of interest. I always seem able to find some that make their way into my collection.

One thing I do to at least make an attempt (however minimal) to keep my collection under some control is to every so often identify some recordings that no longer interest me the way they may have when I purchased them many years ago. They go into what I call my disposal boxes.

[papsrus]

... They go into what I call my disposal boxes.

... and?