Despite a resurgence of interest in vinyl, those scratchy old record albums moldering in the basement or garage probably aren’t worth much.
More Top Picks Area Rug
Most are common, mass produced with hundreds of thousands of copies still floating around decades after the supposed death of that format.
But here and there are the uncommon gems that aren’t scratchy or moldy. And if they weren’t mass produced, that just adds to their value.
The online record marketplace Discogs recently posted the latest in its intermittent roundup of the most expensive albums sold on the site.
At the top of the list, selling in February for nearly $6,500, was the 1973 self-titled album by English blues rockers Mirkwood. Its listing on Discogs noted it was pressed in a limited run of 99 copies.
The list also includes “The Black Album,” by Prince, who decided a week before it was to be released in 1987 that all copies of the record should be destroyed. Some survived, however, and one of those records sold a couple months ago for over $5,000.
There are other famous music makers listed in the roundup, including U2 and the Beatles. At No. 15, a promotional copy of Led Zeppelin’s “Physical Graffiti” created for erstwhile Chicago rock station WMET that displays the station’s call letters in the album cover’s windows sold for $3,000.
Another Chicago area entry appears one spot below in the list after someone purchased a recorded performance by the Governors State University Jazz Band that was released in 1974. “GSU Jazz Live!” sold for $2,999.99.
“It’s great. It’s funky. I can see why people would be all over it,” said Tony Fields, a longtime record collector who with his wife, Chogie Fields, owns Conservatory Vintage & Vinyl in Flossmoor.
He hadn’t heard of the GSU album, but “it’s on our radar now,” he said. Despite being a south suburban record, he’s “been digging out here since the ’90s and I haven’t run across it.”
Recorded at the 1974 Collegiate Jazz Festival at Notre Dame University, GSU’s Faze 1 faculty and staff newsletter from Oct. 27, 1975, announced “GSU Jazz Live!” as “a first album” from The GSU Music Experience, while noting the school’s ensembles won more awards at that festival “than have ever been previously received by one institution.”
That was largely thanks to director Warrick Carter, who was brought in to help build GSU’s music program from scratch. Carter eventually went on to become a dean and provost at Berklee College of Music in Boston, director of entertainment arts at Walt Disney Entertainment and the first African American president of Columbia College Chicago. Along the way, he was inducted into the International Jazz Educators Hall of Fame, according to his 2017 obituary in DownBeat Magazine.
All that was in the future when Carter recruited trumpet player Kenn Brass to study at the new university being built in what was then known as Park Forest South.
Brass, whose trumpet playing is captured on “GSU Jazz Live!,” was surprised when told about the record’s value.
“Now I have to go find my copy,” he said Friday. “It’s around here somewhere.”
Now a music educator at Berklee himself, Brass had been in a City Colleges of Chicago program that funneled music students to University of Illinois in Champaign, but he didn’t look forward to the prospect of living downstate. Carter gave him a viable alternative closer to his South Side home, as well as an accommodating style that made him feel welcome.
“He was an old school band director who knew how to get the most out of anybody,” Brass said. “He could write for any ensemble. We had French horn and tuba on that recording! A lot of people get stuck on charts and have to go with what they have. Dr. Carter would write parts for the people he had.
“If you wanted to be in the band, you could be in the band and we’ll figure out what you can do. He just made it work, and if we had more than one bassist or drummer, he made sure everyone had a chance to shine.”
Still, it was a small program, Brass said. A few people were from the south suburbs, and more were from Chicago proper, but they were all there to learn. Several members were teachers working on their master’s degrees.
Together, they were doing great things, and they could tell. “Everything became about the music,” Brass said. “In one class I had to do an essay and it ended up being about performing music.”
They played together every chance they got.
“High schools, anyone’s place of work, we would go. All we needed was an invitation,” he said.
They played together so much that Carter stopped having formal practices of their set lists.
“There were times for months we didn’t know what we would play that week at rehearsals,” Brass said. “He’d bring tunes and we just played. Same thing at performances. Let’s just play some things.
“That vibe — it builds. We weren’t a professional band, per se, but you knew things were happening when a lot of people at the college would show up at rehearsal to listen. They just showed up. It wasn’t a rehearsal, it was a performance for an audience.”
More Top Picks Best Composite Toe Work Shoes For Men
They were good, and in demand. The school’s Jazz Sextet was one of two American ensembles to perform at the 1974 International Jazz Festival in Montreux, Switzerland, and the entire jazz program traveled to Brazil in 1976 for a series of concerts that were part of the Partners in America Bicentennial Celebration.
And even while it was still being sold in the campus bookstore for $6.50, “GSU Jazz Live!” was making waves. In 1976, Joliet native Steve Rodby, a graduate student at Northwestern University in Chicago, made the album a centerpiece of music camps he gave at University of Portland in Washington and University of Saskatchewan in Canada, according to a contemporary edition of GSU’s Faze 1 newsletter. A few years after that, Rodby started a three decade stint as bass player for the Pat Metheny Group.
Kenn Brass has great memories of performing in Brazil and his copy of “GSU Jazz Live!” is covered like a yearbook with signatures and notes from his bandmate friends. He left the school after graduating in 1976, but came back in the early ’80s to study under Carter again for his master’s degree.
By then, “music was waning,” he said, and Carter left for Berklee in 1985.
“In Chicago, the state, it was all the three Rs,” Brass said. “Music wasn’t as important, or so they thought. The handwriting was on the wall. They were able to hold out for a bit after Dr. Carter left, but it became more important to do other things.”
There’s still jazz performed at Governors State University, but no jazz groups are based at the University Park school these days.
But “GSU Jazz Live!” has lived on in the hearts of grove fans worldwide. As it nears its 50th anniversary, it’s getting even more popular. Tokyo, Japan-based P-Vine records reissued a CD of the recording in 2020 and pressed a vinyl record run of “GSU Jazz Live!” in 2021. It also can be found on some streaming services like Spotify.
“I’m sure a lot of people learned of it from the reissue, and others may have heard of it from an eBay auction,” said Fields, the record store owner in Flossmoor. “If you’re a collector and you hear something that sounds that good, but you’ve never heard it before and there’s no information on it, the assumption is that it’s valuable and it’s rare.”
While not a $3,000 record, Fields recently listed a jazz recording on Discogs released by Malcolm X College musicians that sold for $400 “in a few hours.”
As he prepares to participate in his almost 3-year-old store’s first Record Store Day next weekend, he’s eyeing the market for the other locally produced records he has in stock.
“We get high school bands — we have H-F, Rich Central, Bloom,” he said. “There’s a Harvey grade school band that we have that’s got some jazz funk sounds on there. I wouldn’t say it’s as funky as (the GSU album), but people would be into it.”
If it’s funky enough, maybe someday it will be listed alongside “GSU Jazz Live.”
Landmarks is a weekly column by Paul Eisenberg exploring the people, places and things that have left an indelible mark on the Southland. He can be reached at [email protected].