[Dixielandjazz] Jazz Memorabilia Auction

[Steve barbone]

As you can see from the last paragraph, few musicians, if any, were able to
afford any of these wonderful items.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone 


February 21, 2005 NY TIMES By BEN RATLIFF

Jazz Enthusiasts Pick Up a Few Lingering Echoes

The serious bidding got under way quickly at the big jazz auction yesterday
afternoon, at Jazz at Lincoln Center's Rose Theater.

The auction was front-loaded with Louis Armstrong items, and the first lot
contained a four-page handwritten letter from Louis Armstrong to his booking
agent Joe Glaser, asking about the possibility of a gig in a Broadway
theater: $3,500. An Armstrong telegram to Mr. Glaser about dental problems
and a lack of cash: $1,600. The awesome lot No. 10, a bawdy 32-page
handwritten letter to Armstrong's manager, Oscar Cohen: $25,000.

Guernsey's, the auction house that held the event, hatched the idea 10 years
ago; in the meantime they have had auctions centering on Elvis Presley and
the history of rock. But over the past year Guernsey's has made a concerted
effort to contact the families of a select list of great jazz performers,
living and dead, for the biggest auction yet exclusively dedicated to jazz
artifacts. 

The auction was originally scheduled for the 500-seat Allen Room at Jazz at
Lincoln Center, which is in the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle. But
once word spread widely in mid-January, the interest grew high enough to
move it to the 1,200-seat Rose Theater.

The orchestra seats were full of bidders, and many bids came in over the
telephone or the Internet, which made bidder No. 944 a mysterious
minicelebrity. He or she bought the long Armstrong letter, and paid $23,000
for Thelonious Monk sheet music titled "Can't Call It That."

The jazz great's son, T. S. Monk, who was at the auction, explained that
"Can't Call It That," which dates to the 1940's, was really the famous Monk
tune "Straight, No Chaser." His father, he said, retitled the song so it
could sit on the piano at Monk's home, where Thelonious Monk's mother
wouldn't be offended by the real title's reference to alcohol.

Bidder No. 944 also bought one of Monk's high school notebooks, in which the
15-year-old Stuyvesant High School student wrote in a fabulously rococo hand
about why "Everyone Should Read Good Newspapers," as well as a book report
on "A Tale of Two Cities." Bids started at $3,500 and finally stopped, 110
head-spinning seconds later, at $60,000.

A representative from Guernsey's explained that the bidder wished to remain
anonymous, and provided only the statement, "I am a Monk fan who went to
Stuyvesant." That ruled out three famous and wealthy jazz lovers, Clint
Eastwood, Bill Cosby and Wynton Marsalis.

Among other things, the auction was a gauge of cultural capital, and
Armstrong, Monk, John Coltrane, and Charlie Parker seemed to rate highest.
The highest price paid was for a King alto saxophone owned by Parker. Known
to be Parker's primary instrument in the 1950's, it sold for $225,000, to
another unidentified phone bidder. A few items came with minimum-bidding
levels and did not sell; among them was one of Wes Montgomery's guitars,
offered at $300,000.

Before the auction, jazz scholars expressed concern that many items had not
been given directly to the Smithsonian or a comparable institution by the
musicians' families. Scholars worried that the items would be taken out of
the United States or otherwise never be made available again. (One piece,
Coltrane's original arrangement for his most famous composition, "A Love
Supreme," is an example. It has detailed notes in Coltrane's hand indicating
that he planned five other percussionists for the piece besides his core
quartet.)

The Smithsonian's American Music Collections depend almost entirely on
donations. To that end, Guernsey's arranged for a letter to be sent to the
winning bidders, suggesting that they consider donating the items to the
Smithsonian when they no longer want them.

But Juanita Moore, the executive director of the American Jazz Museum in
Kansas City, Mo., might beg to differ. She bought John Coltrane's dog tags
from the United States Navy, for $9,000, among other items, but for her own
museum.

Lewis Porter, a Coltrane scholar and music professor at Rutgers, who
attended the auction, was not alarmed by the fact that so much memorabilia
was going to private collectors. "I got e-mails from people all over the
country saying, 'It's terrible, they're spreading this stuff to the four
winds,' " he said. "But I say, what was your plan for unearthing these
things? All we know is that the families have something in the attic. Now we
know what they have, we can look at it, we can study it."

For some buyers, the auction was the end of a long quest. Norman Saks, a
Charlie Parker collector from San Diego, bought several items, including two
unreleased Parker tapes, one of them a first-generation live recording from
the Symphony Ballroom in Boston, circa 1951.

"I've been chasing them since the late 1970's," he explained. In 1994 the
writer Stanley Crouch called to tell him the tapes would be auctioned at
Christie's in London. Mr. Saks happened to be in London at the time and bid
on them unsuccessfully. Nine months ago, again by chance, he bought a plane
ticket to New York, as luck would have it, in time for the auction. He bid
on the tapes and bought them for $3,500. How did he feel? "Incredible," he
said. "It's kind of like a sense of calm. The chase is about three-quarters
of it." 

A few notable musicians were in the house. Dave Liebman, the saxophonist,
who has studied Coltrane as rigorously as anyone, sat on his hands during
the offering of the Coltrane sheet music. "Yeah, right," he laughed, when
asked if he bid. "If there was something in the $500 range, I would have
loved a piece of music."

Colin Moynihan contributed reporting for this article.