Post Tagged with: "digging"

I felt like taking a Jazz route for my set on this show, including some classics, some acid jazz stuff, and a beat I made a few years back.

Tracklisting:
Gil Scott-Heron – Is That Jazz?
Grant Green & Dianne Reeves – Down Here On The Ground
Presto – Trip To Brazil
Frank Foreal – Rookie Beat 1
Roy Ayers – I Did It In Seatle
Jazzanova – L.O.V.E. and You & I
E Reece – This Is…
Klaus Wunderlich – Summertime
Dizzy Gillespie Sextet – Groovin’ High

I  had a great conversation with Oliver Wang on Soundwaves Radio about the upcoming 10 year anniversary of his blog, Soul-Sides.com, his love for covers, and more. He also played a few songs for us! His crates are deep, so it was an honor to have him bless the airwaves with some of his favorite tracks.

Charles May & Annette May Thomas – Keep My Baby Warm
West Coast Revival – Feelin’ Alright
Pete Rodriguez – Pete’s Boogaloo
Dizzy Gillespie – Matrix
Labi Siffre – A Little More Line

Holy crap this place has a lot of records…and comics, and musical instruments, and dvd’s, and all sorts of fun things to geek out on!  I spent about three hours at Jelly’s literally going through every single record that they had, with the exception of their 45 section because there were just way too many and I didn’t see anything really solid in the first couple boxes that I went through.  Plus, I had such good luck at Hungy Ear Records that I just didn’t feel like searching for 45’s anymore.  I started with their regular bins, which I suppose might’ve been a mistake as those were the more expensive records. They had a really great Latin section, with lots of records from the Fania, Combo, and Discos Fuentes labels. While I’m not extremely familiar with all of these labels, I was able to pick and choose the ones that look pretty good, based on what I did know.  Jelly’s has a listening station, too!  That made a huge difference.  I was able to take stacks records and kind of sift through what really was worth buying and what was something I can live without, based on sound and price.  After spending about an hour and a half going through the main bins I finally discovered the 45’s section, which looked like this.

It was just too much for me to really go through after already spending that much time in the other sections.  I ended up going through the lower bins for the next hour and a half, which were all $2, and I found a few gems including albums from Raydio, Players Association, Quincy Jones, and much more. Somehow, someway I only ended up spending about $75 at the spot, closing out a great day of diggin!  I was hoping to pick up a last minute gig where I could play my new finds, but unfortunately that did not happen.  I had to wait a couple of days to get home and throw them on the tables in the lab.  I can’t wait to share them with you at one of my events!

I heard from a couple different people that if I was going to be in Honolulu I should definitely check out Hungry Ear Records, which is located in Kailua.  It is a relatively small shop, but very well organized with high quality, good condition records.  This calls for a little bit of a higher price but nothing drastic.  I started going through their jazz section and found quite a few really good pieces for about $5-$10 each.  Then, I found a small mini crate of funk and soul 45’s below the main bins.  I combed through a couple of them and they all looked interesting, and then I realize that the whole crate was good. I ended up buying practically the entire crate which was about fifty 45’s.  Did I mention they were all a dollar each?  I’ll post some of my finds later…
The owner, Ward, and his wife were mad cool.   We started talking about jazz records. They were okay with me taking pictures of the place, and told him I would do a little write up about my digging excursion there.  It’s really cool to meet record store owners who love music, and are quickly open to geek out on music with you.  I felt very welcome there!

I read on yelp that Requests Music has a basement with a ton of records, so I had to go there during our two days that we were in Maui. Once we got there, though, it was quite a bit of vinyl that was unorganized, dirty, water damaged, and pretty much unacceptable. I did manage to find a couple pieces, from new Jack to some soul stuff so it was cool overall.  The dude working there was really nice and he gave me a couple extra Record Store Day items including this cool tote bag. If you can spare A LOT of time to go through all these records, I highly recommend you check out request music in Maui.  I, however, was aching for some beach time, so I only stayed for about an hour.

Aloha from Honolulu. I’m sitting here on the beach thinking about how crazy this last week has been. It all started on Thursday as we (Trina and I) headed out to the Coachella music festival in Indio. We saw an amazing lineup of artists. Too many, in fact, to see them all (sorry DJ Shadow). There were quite a few people there as well!

Outside of the festival, we hung out at the Ace Hotel as well as the Saguaro Hotel, where there was a KCRW pool party on Sunday afternoon. Once we came home from Coachella, we were off to Maui for a couple of days to celebrate my birthday, and then on to Honolulu to go digging and whatnot while Trina worked a conference. More to come…

Although I’ve never made a purchase, I’m a sucker for informercials and “as seen on TV” stores, I finally could no longer resist.  Was at Walgreen’s the other day looking for Halloween stuff, and I found a certified tool of the trade for vinyl collectors and diggers who like to go to swap meets and flea markets:  The Pocket Chair!

Got this for 10 bucks.  It fits in a pretty small pouch, and while it COULD fit in your pocket, it probably wouldn’t be that comfortable.  But with the handle on the pouch, it’s extremely easy to carry around.

If you’re not familiar with the painful process of looking for records at flea markets, let me break it down.  Often, vendors will have crates or boxes of records on the ground instead of on tables.  So you have to kneel down, often for quite a long time.  There’s two options: Squat or actually get on your knees.  Either way, after about 5 minutes of holding the same position, you get tired.  You can switch back and forth, change weight to different feet/knees, but either way, it sucks.  You can try utilizing another crate or box to sit on, but then you’re sitting on records….not cool.  As you can see here, sometimes it’s not easy sifting through a stack of records.  You can spend hours going through one vendor’s piles of gems.  Enter the pocket chair.  Next time you’re at a swap meet and see something like this, pull out your pocket chair, and laugh at the other collectors cursing their knees for getting scraped on the cement.

Went digging yesterday and found this Olatunji record.  How can you pass up a record that says Afro-Percussion?!  Listened to it on the Crosley at the store, took it to the counter, bagged it up, went home, and it’s been sitting there until this evening.  While looking over the art work, I noticed an interesting thing embedded in the cover.  Check it out…