Archive for the ‘Collecting’ Category
This is for all posts that fit into the “collecting” category.
Claude Williamson: ‘Round Midnight (1956)
It’s funny to see how much mail I get via this website from people who hope that I can help them out with this or that. Funny, because I’ve never considered myself to be someone who knows all that much about music in general and various artists and bands in particular. I am a listener, [...]
Remove those annoying CD stickers!
Many moons ago, in my series about collectors’ nightmares, I wrote about those absolutely annoying American stickers at the top of each CD. I have no idea why they are on there, but I can easily think of reasons. Maybe Americans are so lazy that they need to be able to read the title of [...]
Elusive Reissues I: Dinah Washington and Siegel-Schwall
As a collector, one develops all kinds of techniques to keep track of things one believes one still needs. Of course, if you bring the world and the universe into the equation, hardly any of these purchases can be adequately justified, but we all have that constant itch that there is something missing, a disk [...]
And now what?
It’s that time of year again to take a step back and have a quick glance at the one that just passed. I didn’t really need an incentive for that because when I returned home from my Christmas holidays. I had to admit to myself – while looking at the piles of CDs I had stacked up on top of my shelf system, on the floor next to it and at one that had amassed next to my stereo – that my collection had once again outgrown the available space for it.
Yes, I could have crammed everything in that I had bought, especially those larger recently-added items that are so often virtually thrown out of stock at wildly reduced prices around the end of one and the beginning of a new year, but filling up every nook and cranny of my shelf system(s) isn’t really the most intelligent way of going about things. As I have several sub-collections strung together shelf after shelf, I need space in-between the various sections and at strategic spots inside of each section to be able to add new items as I go along.
Sony botched the “Miles Davis: Complete Columbia Album Collection”
Although the various Amazon sites around the globe are ripe with absolutely crushing reviews of an otherwise great collectors boxed set,”Miles Davis: The Complete Columbia Album Collection”, I have to add my two cents as well.
I have seen some badly-produced reissue boxed sets in my life, simply because I seem to be buying too many of them, but this one really is the icing on the cake. One could argue that for a reasonably low price, customers shouldn’t complain that much, but collectors being a larger part of the target audience for this one (despite the fact that collectors already have most of the Miles Davis they’ll ever need), Columbia/Legacy went out of its way to ruin this one.
Observations 10-2009
It’s been a while, sadly enough, but if you have followed the erratic course of this website over the years, it probably didn’t come as a surprise at all. Real life just has a way of continually getting in the way all the time, especially if you have both a stressing day job and an extended family rife with illnesses and diseases. We’re all not getting younger and, boy, ain’t that the truth. What I used to pile onto my desk for a night’s worth of work today takes me a week and my energy line seems to have someone leeching off it continuously. At the moment, when I seem to have the time to sit down and write or update this or that, I’m just too tired, throw on some mindless BluRay disc … and pass out before the studio’s logo has had enough time to pop up on the screen.
Fusion and Stuff
Fusion and Stuff Arranging a larger music collection can be a pretty daunting task, especially if it spans a larger number of genres and styles. Add to this the fact that you can file many CDs under different categories, that classical music adds a whole other dimension to the problems you are bound to encounter [...]
Oscar Peterson Plays Porgy & Bess
Epitomizing. You know it when you see it (to quote the infamous Justice Potter) and you get a lot of it around here. If I like something, I tell you so, and I don’t hold back on the verbiage to get my point across. So, should we give it another go? Oscar Peterson, who in [...]
Observations 04-2009
Mosaic, Benny Goodman, Ian Gillan and … My musical life has been picking up quite a bit lately after having been in a bit of a limbo for all too long. As you might recall, I wrote about not having bought anything for quite a while – and I’m planning on keeping that up – [...]
Boxed-In
I’ve said it often enough around here and I’ll state it again: We collectors are nutcases. There was a time when I collected books, “contemporary horror fiction” to be precise. It all started when I got my first limited edition of some book and it continued with lots of other limited, numbered, lettered and whatnot [...]