There’s a store that sells old vinyl a few blocks from my house in Toronto. I’m not really a collector. And given all the options for accessing music, it makes no sense to me to get my music that way. I know a few audiophiles who swear by the quality of the sound. I’m not going to argue with them. They are very passionate. But I can’t be bothered.
These days I buy vinyl for the album art. Some of it is so interesting. This afternoon I picked up an album by the Jonah Jones Quartet. It’s called Swingin’ at the Cinema. It was released in 1959. It contains a number of songs from movies of the day.
Jonah Jones was a trumpet player and singer who was, according to one entry, “best known for creating concise versions of jazz and swing standards that appealed to a mass audience.”
I was drawn to the album cover art because, well, I’m old, not dead. Whatever else Jonah Jones did with his music, he certainly liked women, and even recorded a song called “I Dig Chicks.” Terribly sexist and inappropriate and all that but, hey, think of it as musical anthropology as in the study of man before he walked upright.