I had a relatively exciting "fresh grabs" day today, and this is the one place I can come to share this story and imagine some of you might not just shake your head and pass me off as a loon.
Like most of you, it's been a looong time since I've done any crate digging, so anything new coming in has been through online ordering. But last night and today I responded persistently to an ad placed by a guy who was selling off his recently deceased father's collection of 5,000 records. His ad said he wanted to sell the lot for $1,000, but if that didn't work, he'd sell them for a buck a piece (I know! and it gets better). I'd pretty much given up on it because he never responded to multiple texts or phone calls, but then I was dozing to Andy Shauf this afternoon when he returned my call and we arranged to meet at his father's house. Donning gloves and a mask, I arrived and he showed me to a room in the basement with what didn't necessarily look like 5,000 records, but 3,000 easy. He said that no one else had been there to go through them, then left me to it, but not before telling me that since I'd been so patient, he'd sell individual records to me for 25 cents a piece. I worked as fast as I could through those records and had gotten through maybe half of them when he came back and told me that since the house had been sold and he really needed to get rid of the records (he invoked his wife), he'd sell them to me for 10 cents each. Now, there weren't any absolute treasures hidden in those shelves, nothing that stunned me when I saw it, but there was a lot of decent stuff and quite a bit of jazz. There was a great run of Ahmad Jamal solo and with his trio, Cannonball Adderly, Ben Webster, Duke Ellington, Woody Herman, Stan Getz, Chico Hamilton, Oscar Peterson, Ella Fitzgerald, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, Herbie Mann, and some lesser known (to me at least) names. Also scored a first pressing of Portrait in Jazz by the Bill Evans Trio (vinyl is a bit rough, but not too bad). And that's just the jazz! Found something I'd never seen before by Sonny Boy Williamson & the Yardbirds, and albums by Stevie Wonder, B.B. King, Petula Clark, Simon & Garfunkel, Sam Cooke, guitarist Ted Greene, Isaac Hayes, Whitney Houston, Billy Joel, Fleetwood Mac, Bobbie Gentry, and of course a bunch of other shit I'd never heard of but looked interesting. Once I'd amassed my multiple stacks, I actually looked at the vinyl for most of them and probably put back at least 75 albums because they were in bad shape. I ended up buying just over 170 records! I'm going to have to go through them all over the next few days, but one thing I can say about their condition is that they didn't seem very dusty/dirty and there wasn't a hint of mold. I'm going to have to mark this as a good record day.
Here's a photo of some of the better jazz records (minus the Bill Evans, which was in a different stack):
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that's still being sorted.
), Trentemøller, Jon Hopkins, MGMT, Floating Points
