I love my vinyl collection. Admittedly, not as much as John Corbett but it is something that I treasure and the moment anyone tries to convince me to put it in storage or – God forbid – sell it I become really defensive and protective. I totally understand John Corbett’s love for his music collection.

Vinyl Freak is - as the full title suggests – a love letter to Corbett’s record collection. I love the passion and the knowledge that oozes off each and every page in this book. I think for me, personally, as someone who isn’t very knowledgeable on Jazz music, I can see how this book could become quite slow and tedious but that is not due in any way, shape or form to do with John Corbett’s writing. It is because of my own ignorance of the genre. Those, like me, would find the book a difficult read. However, if you are a jazz enthusiast then I can quite imagine this book becoming some form of Holy Scripture.

Thoroughly researched and clear passion, Vinyl Freak is a must for the jazz lover in your life.

Vinyl Freak – Love Letters to a Dying Medium by John Corbett is available now.

For more information regarding Duke University Press (@DukePress) please visit www.dukepress.edu.

"Vinyl Freak" is the best book I have read on record collecting, or to be more specific, for the love of vinyl and music discovery.

And I thought I was a music freak.
John Corbett's Vinyl Freak: Love Letters to a Dying Medium is a collection of columns that Corbett wrote in the early 2000's about his vinyl collection and some of the strange records he had found over the years. Corbett also relates his history with records and some personal experiences he's had with them.
This book was both incredibly rewarding and incredibly difficult. Most of the book is full of Corbett's columns and his thoughts on various rare records. Most of the records were bizarre jazz recordings that Corbett was surprised by or confused by. It's a fun way to see how music has changed over time and to hear big names in the music industry. However, a lot of these records were unheard of and didn't hold any interest for me or ring any bells. Parts of the book dragged on as I read column after column of "Here's a cool jazz recording I found!" and then "Here's another cool jazz recording I found!" and "Here's a bunch of jazz musicians you've never heard of who appear on this cool recording!" I would have devoured these columns if I was given one each week, but all in a row, it was a bit overwhelming for me. That being said, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Corbett obviously knows what he's talking about and I feel like I learned quite a bit about vinyl collecting, jazz recordings, and music obsession from him.
Honestly, this book made me feel a strange mix of motivation and inadequacy. I consider myself something of a music snob - while I realize I have a lot of learning to do, I was always the friend who listened to "weird" and obscure music and who could be counted on to recommend interesting new sounds to those around me. Corbett's book opened a whole new world of music to me - and made me realize how limited online music streaming can be for the avid music fan. I learned this as I tried to look up several records Corbett mentioned on Google Play. They weren't there. If I was lucky, the artist in question would have a couple songs on Google Play. But most of the time, there was no record of the album and artist I was looking for and I'd be left to wonder how I would ever hear the interesting sounds that Corbett's writing made me crave. While my feelings of being a failure as a music snob hit in the beginning, they gradually subsided and I found myself feeling more excited by the idea that there's always new music to learn. Take John Corbett, who, after years of working in record shops and researching artists and searching out new music, is still finding new tunes. For me, this was a hopeful ending and I look forward to researching some of the recommended artists a bit more - especially Sun Ra.
I recommend this for music listeners and record collectors. I also recommend it to anyone with a deep knowledge of or interest in strange jazz records - you'll find plenty of music recommendations here.

John Corbett is a music critic, record producer, and curator. For twelve years—from 2000 to 2012—he wrote a column titled "Vinyl Freak" for Downbeat magazine, and those collected columns form the backbone of this book. Corbett wrote about out of print LPs in his extensive collection: ranging from the extremely obscure (and in a few cases, unreleased) to well-known artists. On one level the column was a paean to the joys of collecting records: the thrill of the hunt, the satisfaction of finding a long-sought item, and the possibility of discovering something new by serendipity. Out of print status also raises potential questions about the long-term accessibility of recorded music. If it's been recorded, why can't I hear it? And who picks the winners and losers?

When Corbett began the column, vinyl seemed to be on the way out, forever: technologies that are replaced (in this case by the compact disc) rarely come back. Ironically, vinyl actually began to see a resurgence about the time the column came to an end. Of course it's no longer the mass medium it was when he started collecting, but at least it survives as a subculture. Corbett ruminates on the medium and the urge to collect in short essays called "Tracks" that are interspersed throughout the book, breaking up the flow of columns and providing a broader perspective. There's something about the LP as a physical object that remains attractive. They're large enough for sizeable cover art and liner notes in a large, readable font size. They establish a physical bond with the listener that even compact discs lack, never mind the virtual aspect of downloaded music.

Corbett make the distinction between hoarders and collectors: it's not hard to amass a large quantity of records, but unless they're chosen with a connoisseur's eye, you're just hoarding. He says he's a "freak, not a snob." Generally preferring vinyl for both the sound and the attractiveness of the physical object, he'll take music in other forms if that's the only way to get it. He even acknowledges that some very quiet music (classical music in particular) is better heard on CD than LP, because of the high noise floor that plagues even excellent vinyl pressings.

The Downbeat columns were inherently noncommercial: why promote recordings that are unavailable to anyone who is not willing to search for them? He updates the status of the recordings since the original article was published, and they are not especially upbeat.Some of the recordings have been re-released in limited editions which are themselves rare and hard to find, while many of them are still out of print in their original releases. Corbett himself has attempted to reissue many of them, with varying degrees of success. His choices for the column were at least somewhat oriented towards the magazine's audience: more jazz than other genres, and more mainstream than not. So he devotes Track Five to free jazz ("Specialty of the House"), a particular personal interest that he chose not to emphasize in the column, but presented here in a similar format.

Track Six ("The Taming of the Freak") describes the climax of Corbett's life as a collector. He purchased salvage rights to an enormous Sun Ra archive in the home of a longtime manager in Chicago. It's a surreal scene: Corbett, recovering from a hernia operation, supervising a team working to take everything of value out of the house, working against the clock and limitations imposed by the heirs. The team rescued unissued tapes, original album artwork, business plans, contracts, correspondence...a vast array of the record of an iconoclastic career in music. After the haul had been put into storage there was a long process of inventorying it and finding appropriate homes for exhibitions, and eventually museums and archives where the materials could be properly conserved and made available for study. The entire intensive, exhaustive process made record hunting look insignificant by comparison. After years of hunting down rare Sun Ra LPs, this was the mother lode, and it cured Corbett of the urge to collect records.

The reader probably has to be (or have been) an avid record collector to truly enter into Corbett's story. It is a personal journey in many ways. But since the discussion is at least as much about the music being collected as the vinyl package, there is also a lot of intriguing music in the book. Much (but not all) of it jazz, and all of it worth seeking out: it comes with Corbett's highest recommendation.

I have a confession - I don't listen to Jazz, and I don't own any vinyl records. Nevertheless, I found this book to be endlessly interesting and engaging. Corbett's passion shines through so clearly in his writing, it's hard not to get enthusiastic about the write ups he did for the selection of albums featured in his column - now reproduced in this book.

The essays that accompany each section were thoughtful, emotional, and the high point of the book for me. Particularly the memorable rescue Alton / Sun-Ra rescue! The tensions as Corbett describes the car ride to the house, the aftermath of shepherding such a vast and valuable collection ... just wonderful. I have fond memories of watching my parents set up the record player when I was very small, even if I can't remember a single thing that was played. This book almost made me nostalgic for experiences I never had.

Dutifully, once I'd finished and reflected a but, I went to youtube and listened to a few of Sun-Ra's top tracks (That's How I Feel providing the ambiance for writing this review) ... and proposed half-seriously to my partner "I think we should get into vinyl.."

This book was ok. I was shocked to read how far people go to collect vinyl! Scary business to max your credit cards and be so obsessed with getting a record. I skimmed through a lot of the book just because it drug for me but it wasn't a bad book

As John Corbett himself points out, the death of vinyl has been greatly exaggerated. Far from being killed off by the digital format, vinyl sales are now at a 25 year high, ushering in a revitalised reissue market and a new generation of collectors. With it has emerged a fresh economy in vinyl related merchandise, a new generation of affordable record players, storage solutions and books on the format. The latter are extremely variable, a few choice histories of vinyl, some memoirs spun around the collecting bug of the vinyl obsessive, earnest academic investigations into the longevity of the medium, but also a lot of cheap, flimsy cash-ins and vapid coffee table nonsense. Vinyl Freak is not one of these books. It is, for the record collector, a 180mg heavyweight slab of pure joy.

Subtitled ‘Love Letters to a Dying Medium’, Vinyl Freak alternates John Corbett’s personal paeans to the format with chunks of his long-running Vinyl Freak column written for DownBeat Magazine. The column celebrated obscure items from Corbett’s collection that at the original time of publication were not available digitally. Most of the Vinyl Freak columns focus on jazz records, but even for someone like me for whom jazz is genre blind-spot, the writing remains engaging. I can’t have read more than half a dozen of the original columns before I was opening YouTube to search for audio clips of the artists discussed, such is the infectious enthusiasm of Corbett’s writing. As Corbett points out, music history is written and re-written by what is and what isn’t currently in print. For this reason, the post-scripts to the columns are particularly fascinating, detailing the life of the recordings in the intervening years.

It’s the sections between the Vinyl Freak columns that give most insight into John Corbett’s life, and how he became a record collector. Thoughtfully he ponders what it is about the record format that makes it so special. Evocatively he describes the physicality of searching for records, the way in which the crate-digger navigates the racks, the look and feel and smell of vinyl. He writes exceptionally on the subculture of the collector, noting that what has always fascinated him about records is ‘the play between understanding them as objects of solitary attention and as the focal point of social interaction’. For this reason my one reservation about the book was the ‘Speciality of the House’ section where Corbett details personal highlights from his free-improvisation collection, which, without the engaging detail of the Vinyl Freak columns, veers into list territory, an aspect of record collecting I find slightly off-putting due to its association with one-upmanship.

For me, the real gem of the book was hidden right at the end, in the chapter nerve-rackingly titled ‘Anything Can Happen’. Nerve-racking because it retells the story of receiving a forwarded email in which it becomes apparent that the home of the recently deceased Alton Abraham is being cleared and the future of decades worth of artefacts from the career of Sun Ra, whom Abraham’s managed, hang in jeopardy. There follows a story of serendipity, of the subjectivity of value and of a man spending four years of his life, and damn near bankrupting himself in the process, to save what now forms the basis of an important archive of material. I was actually near tears by the end of the chapter.

A wonderful book. If John Corbett is a freak, then you’ve got to question anyone that wants to be normal.

Interesting book but jazz music is not really my first love. I liked his description of the record store. Similar experience to my own.