Zero to sixty in about eleven months

As attentive (and not-so) readers of this blog well know, since discovering jazz some two years ago, I have primarily relied on the Penguin Jazz Recordings Guide as my key reference to help me select jazz recordings to buy. I have used that book's Core Collection of 185 recordings as the list of what I should buy, basically using it as a checklist and picking up recordings by artists that catch my attention and have a selection (or two, or more) in the core collection. This has been helpful in selecting both dreams (like Helen Merrill with Clifford Brown and Portrait of Sheila by Sheila Jordan) and duds (such as The Magic City by Sun Ra and Sound by Roscoe Mitchell) to add to my collection - of course not knowing they are dreams or duds until after I get them - recordings that I never would have otherwise have thought or known to buy. Well, two days ago, I received After Midnight by Nat "King" Cole and yesterday, "At the Golden Circle" by Ornette Coleman, giving me a total of 60 recordings from the core collection list. (I have many more jazz CD's than that, however.) Pretty soon, I'll be adding a couple more, but the majority of my recent purchases are other things I have wanted that do not appear on the list. Anyway, I always wanted to mark the 60-point in my acquisitions, since it is almost one-third of the list and is quite a milestone in and of itself. I'll have to get on the Macintosh and check our iTunes and music database software to get a count of my entire collection for my next entry.

Nat Cole, by the way, kicks ass. It will definitely end up on the Yoity Tot list before long.