I Should Buy This Album Because....um, it's on sale

Playing right now: John Coltrane - Standard Coltrane

Yesterday was the last day of Paul's CDs. The landmark music store is closing, but Paul's employee Karl Hendricks is carrying the tradition on in the same storefront on Liberty Avenue with Sound Cat Music. In fact, both "stores" have been running concurrently since January. Don't ask how or why, it just did, and it worked.

Paul gradually marked down his inventory further and further until it was down to 60% about a week ago, where it stayed through yesterday. I combed through the racks several times over the past couple months, especially when he went down to 40- and 50%. So yesterday with the shelves looking bare in the jazz section, I felt like grabbing anything that looked of interest to me. I had hoped I might be able to get a recent Miles Davis box set, and when I found out that it was gone, I started to examine the one remaining Miles set - Seven Steps to Heaven. I don't even have that album, and this one also including the live albums from that in-between era. I also picked up the Roscoe Mitchell solo saxophone album. And FMP's Cecil Taylor and Han Bennink duet album.

After awhile I reached saturation point. And reality kicked in - am I really interested in all of this stuff in my huge pile? When will I get time to listen to all of it? By listening to it, as I've said ad nauseum here, that means getting to know the music, becoming familiar with the solos or the hooks or the running order - and the song titles. I want to hear all of it. But hearing things is different, slightly, than owning it, and putting it on the pile of other albums that cause you to feel really baffled and ultimately frustrating when you wake up in the morning and want to play something but can't decide what. And in the case of the Miles set, 60% of $106 is still over $40 - a lot of eggs in one basket.

So I narrowed my pile down to 10 things that I needed. The CD playing now was one of them. Then:
John Coltrane - Dakar
Andrew Hill - Dusk
Roland Kirk - Kirk in Copenhagen
Archie Shepp & Roswell Rudd - Live in New York
Bonzo Dog Band - Gorilla (because my vinyl is severely warped)
Mary Celeste - Our Guernica (Local band I missed out on in the mid-'00s; only $6 originally so I couldn't say no any longer)
Louis Armstrong - Hot Fives and Sevens Vols. 1 and 2.
Bo Diddley - Gold (with the family in mind)

Looking at it now, my choices of non-jazz are pretty arbitrary. Oh well, as I said, there was a point where I reached saturation and couldn't take the digging through the racks any longer. I had initially thought of purchasing a couple box sets and flipping them online, but then common sense reminded me that I'd be pretty pissed if they didn't sell.

Coltrane's done so I have to decide what's next.