BY MATS GUSTAFSSON
Published in print in We Jazz Magazine, issue 16 (Fall 2025)
VINYL COLLECTING IS EXHAUSTING.
Vinyl collecting is beautiful, creative, and inspirational.
Vinyl collecting means the world to me.
Vinyl collecting is… dangerous and very addictive.
I was deeply hooked already at the age of 10 when I decided to get all the Little Richard records ever done. Still working on it.
Stay away if you wanna keep sane, healthy, and/or wealthy.
Or go ALL IN for some extreme fun and joy!
COLLECTING IS A LOT ABOUT CHAIN REACTIONS. Associations. One thing leads to another. Making us find new directions, new threads to follow, new objects, new themes in a never-ending process. We will never ever be able to have a complete collection, the perfect collection. There are always more things to get. Perfection sucks. When you can accept the fact of incompleteness and the charm of changing directions quicker than Lionel Messi or Connor McDavid, you will experience the most fun you can have with your clothes on. This is the beauty of it all.
Doors – in both mono and stereo – open up when you realize that perfection is just a chimaera and fantasy and therefore nothing to strive for.
The road. Is all. What you find during your search is the SHIT. This is true for all artistic activities. The excitement never stops. The highs are endless, and the kicks are of unstoppable quality and content. The goals might change, but the adrenaline buzz remains. The search for undetected music forces you to move forward in the most beautiful and unexpected ways of wonder. Fantasy has no limits. You make up your own rules.
I collect and search for a wide array of stuff. Music of most genres – garage, HC, punk, jazz, New Orleans, cool, metal, tropicalia, music from Mali, Sudan, and Ethiopia, Carnatic music, noise, Dhrupad, Sami yoik, Inuit music, Scandinavian folk, psych, and more. With a special focus on improvised and experimental music, I trim my garden every day. In most available mediums of course. Flexi-discs, reel-to-reel tapes, cassettes, acetates, shellacs, and of course vinyl in all forms and sizes, from 5” to 13“. Digital files though… I don’t even consider collecting it. Never have.
Something else that never interested me is autographs. Signatures. Signed albums and posters. To put your name on artistic materials. Many of my favorite visual artists never sign their work on the front of the image. Swedish–American artists Clay Ketter and Edward Jarvis are role models here. Austrian Mathias Pöschl as well.
A few sport-related exceptions from this rule should be mentioned here. I was truly ecstatic when I got the signature of Swedish cross-country skier Sven-Åke Lundbäck in 1976 and even more so when my uncle, Olympic athlete, Rolf Junefelt visited Toronto in the mid-70s and got back home with a mini-hockey-stick signed by Inge Hammarström and the greatest Swede ever, Börje “BJ” Salming! I cried with joy. Trembling in slow ecstasy.
But signed albums? Not for me, Sir. It destroys the surface of the album cover. Fucks up the layout and design. The music is enough. Period. In Japan, it usually lowers the value of an album. Autographs connected to music are not my cup of rye.
THIS WAS TRUE UNTIL OCTOBER 2013. I was visiting a record dealer and collector in Vienna. He knew I had a true “holy grail” to trade with. An out-of-this-world great solo album by Japanese sax genius Kaoru Abe; Winter 1972.
A mythical album that almost no one ever had seen. Many people even doubt its existence. Music is KILLER. 11 out of 10. We kid you not. This music grabs you by your lower parts and sends you off in an orbit of utter beauty. Long story short: I managed to buy a handful of copies in Japan from the original producer years ago. Helping him out with promotion for a CD reissue. I cannot sell this amazing album for cash. But I am open to trades. It has to FEEL right.
My Austrian friend really wanted to trade for a copy. He was trying all kinds of maneuvers and offered me some fantastic albums. He looked like he had the fever. His thin body was shivering. He had definite difficulties in completing full sentences.
His huge collection was full of rarities. I was tempted to get myself a couple of the great NDR–Jazz workshop albums from 1964 (with the wild large ensemble experiments by Georg Riedel) and 1965 (with Carla Bley and Steve Lacy!). Magnificent objects from a very important time period. Jazz before jazz went bananas and free. Very important for educational purposes and my well-being. These records are hard to find (get them!!!) but not even close in trade-value with the Abe LP, surely close to a 3,000-4,000 Euro value at this point. This LP comes in a plain white thick cardboard cover and is made in a maximum 50 copies. The edition sitting in a box in a Japanese wardrobe for ages.
I looked through some EPs and found, among other things, the first recording of Joe Zawinul, Jazz a la Carte. But still not enough for a trade.
THEN IT HAPPENED. My friend brought a record out from the bulging record shelf. Walking slowly towards me. Smiling.
This made me confused, since I noticed which album he was carrying. The epic orchestral masterpiece Mingus, Mingus, Mingus, Mingus, Mingus, by Charles Mingus on Impulse Records. A fantastic album. A total classic. Tightly knotted arrangements by Bob Hammer of many of Mingus’s timeless compositions in new versions. “Celia”, “Haitian Fight Song”, “Better Get Hit in your Soul” and “Theme for Lester Young” (aka “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat”). Absolute top notch soloistic appearances by Eric Dolphy, Jaki Byard, and Booker Ervin.
But… just a regular LP. Nothing rare. Just an ordinary Impulse album that I already owned. The music is pure genius and creative poetry to my ears and soul. This happens to be the last studio recording with a large group of Mingus during the 60s. A crowning. In Jazz. And for sure one of the most important albums by Charles “Charlie” Mingus Jr. There is a rhythmic drive of utter urgency chasing away digital evil spirits and wakening up entire worlds of joy and knockout visions. Warm arrangements inviting us to smile and dance wildly. The furious and almost raw character of the music and the slightly anarchistic approach make me scream right out. WHAMBAMTHANKYOUMAM! The soloists are lit candles of delight. The joy of playing is immense.
Two different occasions during the year of 1962 resulted in two slightly different, larger ensembles. Walter Perkins and Dannie Richmond deliver swing in a most affecting way and manner. The tuba of Don Butterfield is creating a sub-deep pathos of bliss. The sax playing of Eric Dolphy is pure magic in its creative and almost tender lyrical approach.
Mingus himself is feeding this creature of music as a manic hurricane with his gut-stringed double bass. I don’t know any other bass player in the history of jazz who can PUSH the music in such way. J. Blanton, perhaps? Barry Guy? Ole Morten Vågan? The warm and wood-sounding inner core of his tone is an epicenter of beauty, and his accents hit the beat before the beat. If you know what I mean? It creates a prolific friction and balance between the piano and drums. So unique, so great, so special. I cannot sit still.
The first minute of “Haitian Fight Song” (labeled as “II B.S.”) is some of the most ridiculously grinding and action-packed musical buildup ever. Ever.
“E’s Flat Ah’s Flat Too” (labeled as “Hora Decubitus”) is given a new light. Absolute stellar in its execution. We can only speculate on why so many titles of classic Mingus tunes are renamed here. What we hear, though, is jazz history made.
This album makes me gloriously happy.
The perfect balance between the usage of historical materials and approaches and an attitude of looking forward into the future of a music form. I shiver in slow ecstasy.
“Nice record,” I said. Still confused by the commonness of the object. “Look inside,” my friend told me, still enigmatically smiling.
Jazz-owls-in-the-urge-of-collecting-madness!!! Alarm. ALARM! ALAAAAAARM! Howling Wolfs and Screaming Jay’s! Saatana perkele! Strobe lights in my brain. Exploding tumble dryers full of seven inches!!!
Suddenly my whole existence was in process. In a short moment of self-reflection, I ask myself: am I addicted in some way?
THE BEAUTIFULLY LAMINATED GATEFOLD COVER CONTAINED SOMETHING UNIQUE. Play myself backwards in 45. Eat a shellac or two.
Signed. The album is signed. In 1964. During the well-documented European tour of the Mingus Sextet. During a stop in Hamburg, someone convinced the sextet to sign this record. Eric Dolphy, Jaki Byard, Dannie Richmond, and peculiarly enough also Clifford Jordan (who does not even play on this record), and as the vinyl cream of the crop on this mono pressing. Up-side-down; the signature of Charlie Mingus himself.
Can you believe it? EricfuckinDolphys signature. And Mingus. UPSIDEDOWN!!!!
I shiver in slow ecstasy.
I quiver in slow ecstasy.
Thank you, old gods, so goooooood I don’t care about autographs and other irrelevant matters…
AFTER AN HOUR OF NEGOTIATION, both of us constantly trembling, we managed to cut a deal. My inner smile was expanding. But who really cares about signed objects? Don’t look at me.
Nowadays, I recreate my inner smile when I look proudly at the signed albums I have in my archive. Lionel Hampton, Penderecki, Monica Zetterlund, Sun Ra, Derek Bailey, Georg Riedel, AEOC, Steve Lacy, Thomas Mera Gartz, Cecil Taylor, Bill Dixon, Evan Parker, Brötzmann, and more…
But nothing is more beautiful than this Mingus album.
Mingus, Mingus, Mingus, Mingus, Mingus
With ”Charlie Mingus”, UPSIDEDOWN!!!! I (still) shiver in slow ecstasy.