The other day Toronto-based network City TV followed Toronto Raptors head coach Nick Nurse on a record shopping trip in Memphis. I wasn’t aware, but Nurse is a serious record collector - reportedly he’s got over a thousand records - and while he was there, he made a very nice score: a copy of Prince’s Black Album, which was pressed but never released in the 80s (More on that here).
As a music writer and jazz snob, I’ve got a sizable collection, too. Not in the thousands, but definitely a few hundred, and like any collector I have some records that mean more to me than others. Maybe they’re rare, maybe I just really like them or maybe they’re cornerstones of my collection I listen to often. So, feeling inspired by Nurse’s trip, here’s some of the core items of my record collection:
Grateful Dead - July 1978 (Rhino, 2016)
A nice hefty box set that came out in early 2016, July 1978, is a twelve-CD set compiling five complete shows, plus a big booklet of liner notes. It’s not my favourite Dead box - I’d say May 1977 is my fave - but it’s the only one I have a physical copy of, and it’s pretty good music. I’m of the belief that any serious Deadhead probably should have a box set or two, and this is the one my Dead fandom is kind of centered around. Plus, there’s a nice (and rare!) version of “Werewolves of London” on this box, which is a nice bonus.
Charles Mingus - The Jazz Workshop Concerts 1964-65 (Mosaic, 2012)
I’m bullish on Mingus and this set, which features arguably his best touring band (Eric Dolphy, Jaki Byard, Dannie Richmond, Clifford Jordan, Johnny Coles) puts the bassist and group firmly in the spotlight. Indeed, 1964 is a year that’s been focused on quite heavily: there’s Cornell 1964, The Great Concert of Charles Mingus, and two volumes of Mingus In Europe on Enja. It’s not hard to see why: a lot of these shows were recorded by (and later broadcast on) European radio and there’s the spectre of them being Dolphy’s final shows. But here, Mosaic dug into Mingus’s archives and came up with wonderful sets from Town Hall in NYC and Amsterdam, two Monterey Festival sets (both 1964 and 1965) and finally, one from Minneapolis in mid-1965. Sadly, Dolphy passed in 1964 and he’s only featured on some of this set, but throughout there’s great playing (Byard is arguably the MVP with his versatile piano playing, which runs the gamut from stride and regime to Mingus’s complex charts) and the bulk of this is otherwise unavailable, especially in unedited form.
V/A - Weird Nightmare: Meditations on Mingus (Columbia, 1992)
As said above, I’m a big Mingus fan. I’m also a fan of Hal Willner tribute compilations, which often feature a wide range of musicians pushed out of their comfort zone and new spins on old classics. So this one, which has been out of print for decades, is a personal fave of mine. It takes Harry Partch’s percussion instruments-- think weirdly tuned marimbas and drums- and mixes them with a band of all stars: Bill Frisell, Greg Cohen, Chuck D, Elvis Costello, Robbie Robertson and more. It’s not perfect - no Willner compilation is - and a couple of the tracks fall apart, but throughout this set the music’s engaging and it makes a case that Mingus was one of the best composers of his time. It’s worth digging around for.
V/A - American Anthology of Folk Music (Folkways, 1952)
Okay, I don’t own the original, wooden-box edition of this, but I have the six-CD edition that Folkways reissued in 1997. I’m a sucker for old-timey blues and folk music (I also have a bunch of the old Columbia Roots and Blues series) and this set is the motherlode. Compiled by one Harry Smith, a record collector who was equally eccentric and genius, this set makes a case for the rise of folk music. Not as a specific genre, exactly, but more like folk as in folk art: some of the music here’s weird, some of it’s spooky and some of it’s sublime. The Carter Family sits next to Mississippi John Hurt, jug bands next to choirs. It’s pure Americana, and the liners are no slouch, either. I picked it up after reading Greil Marcus’s book The Old, Weird America which was loosely about this set and how it influenced Bob Dylan and The Band and I fell in love.
Art Pepper - The Complete Village Vanguard Sessions (Contemporary, 1995)
There’s a few sets that got away in my time record collecting, and Art Pepper’s Complete Galaxy Recordings is one of them. Saw it at a music store in Toronto once, decided it wasn’t worth the $300 they wanted for it and next time I went back to the city, the store was a condo. Oh well. So when I saw this one I snapped it up. Pepper is one of my fave sax players and this set, recorded after his big comeback in the mid-70s, is a wonderful snapshot of the man at work. He talks a lot, plays even more and over the course of four nights at a legendary New York nightclub blows the roof off. It helps that he’s got a great backing band, too: Elvin Jones, George Miraz and George Cables. It’s a great set when you want to throw on some jazz and just zone out.
Miles Davis - The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel 1965 (Columbia/Legacy, 1995)
Another set I snapped up as soon as I saw a copy - beat up box and all - this is one that rarely disappoints. Featuring my fave of all Miles’s groups (Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Tony Williams and Ron Carter) this one has the entire engagement at Chicago’s Plugged Nickel in 1965, a run that was professionally recorded and featured on a LP back in the day. And the music is so, so good. This band had been recording and gigging for a few years by this point and was exceptionally talented; in a move that makes me wonder if they were bored with the music, they turn songs around on their head, almost trying to subvert Davis at times, with songs being pushed and stretched. As the handy Penguin Guide to Jazz notes: “they fed directly into Miles’s electric revolution.” It’s definitely a major point in Davis’s long career and the music here isn’t as simple as Kind of Blue and it’s not as polished as mid-60s studio records like ESP or Miles Smiles. But for anyone who’s serious about diving into Davis’s music and the ways his groups changed and informed jazz, I think this set is essential.
Lush - Chorus (4AD, 2015)
I guess this one was a limited edition? I was lucky enough to score a copy from a UK-based record store when it came out because I always told myself if their records got the reissue treatment, I’d try and pick them up. Import fees and shipping be damned. I’m glad I did, because it’s a set I listen to often. Lush was one of the best bands to come out of the UK in the late 1980s, with albums that mixed waves of swirling guitars and harmonies with power-pop chops and hooks. They were unafraid to cover Wire, to play acoustic sessions and the twin-guitar attack of Miki Berenyi and Emma Anderson was unmatched by any of their peers. I’m a big fan. And this set compiles pretty much everything they did all in one box: I’m talking singles, b-sides, soundtrack cuts and BBC Sessions are appended to their proper LPs. It’s a one-stop shop for anything a fan of the band would want.
That’s enough love letters to my record collection, although there’s other sets that mean a lot to me: Coltrane/Monk Live at Carnegie Hall, Louis Armstrong’s Complete Hot Fives and Sevens, Bruce Springsteen’s Tracks and the Left of the Dial box set. But what about you: what records are the cornerstones of your collection? Let me know and maybe I’ll compile them into a reply to this post.