about me

I’m a listener and a writer and an obsessive autodidact who finds peace in music.

Usually that music is on vinyl.

The first record I ever bought

was Coldplay’s Viva La Vida. I was four days out of high school when I spotted the 12-inch LP sitting loose above the CD rack at Best Buy— and with a tiny nod I decided I need that.

I didn’t know how to operate a turntable. My first entrée into playback came eighteen months later with an old Sony automatic, and with it I began learning how vinyl actually works. The physical minutiae of a turntable, the electronics of amplification, the idea of a vibrating needle creating full, layered, complex music… this was all magic to a millennial like me. Still I had no idea how this budding fascination would one day grow to consume me.

Fast forward to 2017.

I found myself making frequent evening detours to Amoeba Music, a place where, showered in music, my mind could go quiet. It’s there I excitedly partook in the ritual that is Record Store Day, when I waited two hundred people deep in a line only to be turned away when none of the RSD exclusive releases I wanted were left available.

In hindsight that might have been the day that broke me. A kind of fateful apex that shattered my perception, think akin to when Gen-Xers first heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” In an instant, everything is different now.

Why the outsized impact of one sunny day in April? It was, I think, the tightly contained sequence of expectation and disappointment, no doubt a microcosm of bigger things I was dealing with. Those bigger things I had little solution for, but to counter the simple freefall of not being able to buy what I wanted, I let spending become an emotional rope.

So I walked two blocks north to another record store, where I fumbled through the bins and found a stereo Blonde On Blonde with the 9-picture gatefold. The price tag was bigger than anything I’d bought to date, but in the immortal words of Denzel Washington: I'm leaving here with something.

My brain saw a way to cope with the malaise, the exhaustion. All of it. Money out, records in.

By 2019,

I was an Obsessive Vinyl Collector, the monster lurking under the bed of any happy relationship.

After filling up on rock records, I turned to jazz as a natural next step. I had some intellectual appreciation for jazz but little actual exposure, and me the blooming audiophile sought to experience the renowned hi-fi 50s/60s era the way it was originally heard: on vinyl.

Jazz also gave oxygen to my collectorist fire, given its endlessly deep well of styles, titles, versions, and history all centered around the big black disc. So I rapidly started assembling what I told my girlfriend was a small but well-curated all-analog jazz collection*.

*That collection is still well-curated thank you but no longer small, and my girlfriend is still around but is now my wife. Brave woman.

Somewhere in the depths of that new jazz obsession I found Contemporary Records. I think I was looking for that good good Van Gelder sound and I stumbled on another compounded surname, another engineer who pressed a legacy in wax. This legend was closer to home— I mean literally closer to my home, which sat just a mile north of 8481 Melrose Place in West Hollywood. There was set the story of audio engineer Roy DuNann.

Wait. Los Angeles jazz? How could jazz spring from this tasteless wasteland? I thought jazz was the product of dark subway tunnels and smokey basements, a solemn art composed of winter air like New York bagels require New York water. Vaguely I sensed that jazz would melt in the sunshine like that copy of Bridge Over Troubled Water that died on my windowside turntable in 2014.

Yet 10% of jazzheads online loved to chime in about Way Out West and Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section and I found those guys raving into the abyss that Roy DuNann wiped the floor with Van Gelder but never got his flowers.

Contemporary cut the purest, clean, most audiophile recordings of their era. Perhaps of all time. So they said.

I was totally in the dark. So I chose to get my ass back to the record store.

Listen to me talk about jazz and vinyl for a moment

Music should be tactile. An old slab of vinyl puts you in contact with the past; it puts you in a story with every person who’s held it, every turntable and stylus it’s seen. Collectors express little appreciation for the blemishes and stamps of owners past— but through these defects I feel connected to them. We’ve shared something special through the records we’ve both enjoyed.

Mid-century jazz on vinyl carries a particular serendipity. It was usually recorded in peak organic fashion, with a handful of high-class European mics in a single room, all of them tracked straight to mono or stereo tape. You hear the walls. No overdubs, no re-mixing. The ensemble is inseparable from itself.

Then you put that recording on vinyl which encapsulates it whole. A record is unchangeable, complete, it is what it is and can't be transferred or copied. I’ve always felt like the recording methods for 50s/60s jazz are in perfect logical harmony with the way we listen to vinyl. The organic inexactitude of physical playback throws its own spice into things, just another ingredient in the improvisational mélange, making jazz more jazz. Vinyl is the perfect delivery system for the genre. /end

So there I was

I’d heard story of DuNann’s (and Howard Holzer’s) luminescent recordings and I wanted a taste… but, as luck would have it, I couldn't find them 'round the bins. At least not the correct versions. I wanted vintage. Analog! So I hit eBay and Discogs and got my elbows deep.

And I quickly realized that Contemporary’s records were confusing as hell; there was a lot of it but nobody knew what was what, what was from when, who mastered this and where and from what, and who actually pressed this or that. What's worse, the collector side was mostly just repeating the same series of (obviously) incorrect assumptions without many earnest attempts at actual deep research.

I encountered guides for identifying first pressings, all of them too imprecise to be useful. You could feel collectors trying to Blue Note the problem. “Original pressings” were the priority, of course; what the collector class wants is the west coast version of an RVG stamp, something around which to coalesce a lazy anti-reissue bias into something concrete.

Contemporary Records vinyl

is not the simple study that collectors crave. There are several generations of reissues, a lot of lacquer cuts, a handful of plating and pressing plants, and many more vagaries than we'd like.

Contemporary built a prominent and valuable catalog while remaining an independent family business long past the point when other labels of its ilk had become marbles in gray conglomerated bags. And yet — because documentation is scattered, because Coltrane or Miles never recorded for them, because there aren't enough session photos, because its marketing was too sunny and west coast, on and on — Contemporary's history remains cloudy. As a result, people don't widely understand its vinyl releases.

I started peeling Contemporary’s layers back by listening. Quickly I noticed vast differences between pressings of the same title; most of them sounded fantastic but each mastering was individual, demonstrably different, its own unique take.

By recording instruments simple and raw, DuNann and Howard Holzer deferred several creative mixing burdens to the mastering step, where they’d add reverb and perform complicated adjustments on-the-fly. This resulted in what I was hearing— that disparate approaches by engineers over time had created widely disparate sounds. This was a piece of the sonic puzzle.

But only a piece. There were stories beneath all that. People and places and equipment and history, evolutions in technology and the marketplace checkpointed by these periodic imprints in black plastic. I wanted to learn and understand.

I became obsessed with connecting the dots, finding simple thrill in the fact that new discoveries were my own and not from that article or LondonJazzCollector or the Hoffman forums or wherever. Contemporary was clean and free of the pretense and FOMO and Dudes Arguing that meets you in every other corner of this hobby. It gave me a new window on several histories: music, Los Angeles, postal codes, telephone exchanges, America.

Mining Contemporary’s legacy became intensely personal. Maybe, I thought, this could be a healthy outlet for my obsession. So I came up with an idea.

And then it grew way too big.

Building this website has resurrected and cultivated the skills I forgot I had. Graphic design, attention to detail, love for electronics, an appreciation for data, photography and editing, custom CSS, the ability to do actual math.

But what started as a reprieve became just like every other project, plagued by a familiar dark rabbit hole of hopeless effort. Should I have done this? Is this just the extravagant self-enabling of addiction? I've created a space where retail therapy drives the collection of information, where suddenly overspending is justified under the guise of “research.” Sometimes I feel pushed towards completism just to earn my authority on the subject. Do I just want to be the best at something for the sake of it?

What I’m saying is, this site started simple and got messy as hell. Too much information to collate. Too many records to scan and photograph. Too many variants to catalog. Too many eBay listings to spend money on. Too much money going out the door. How did one summary about mastering history become four MF pages? How does assembling a single page for which I’ve already done all the research still take a month of my time? And all of this is for… what? For England, James?

For me. To show myself I can deliver on something, and not just anything: a creative, obsessive idea that really is my idea. And at the end of all my handwringing and second-guessing, I think I’ve built something valuable. I’m proud of this little site.