An awful lot of things happened when I turned thirteen.
To start with, I hit puberty. Girls weren’t an issue yet, at thirteen and not even at fourteen, but by fifteen my hormones were running wild inside me. They affected everything I thought, felt or did –including how I spent my money. They would also, but more obliquely, because they weren’t the only determiners of my then-decisions, affect what music I listened as I began to buy my own records.
I was thirteen, when I first got my own paper route. Until then, for eternity (well, four years), I’d been subsisting on 50 cents a week allowance, which was enough for a ticket to a movie matinee with a small bag of popcorn or a soda. With the paper route, I became an entrepreneur. (Of sorts.) Compared to the past, I now had virtually unlimited wealth ($6 a week) and nothing I was required to spend it on. Rich for the first time, I did what anyone would do: I went wild, like the people with the winning Powerball tickets do.
Almost immediately, I bought subscriptions to four different science fiction and fantasy magazines (Astounding, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Galaxy and Beyond) and I joined the Science Fiction Book Club, which gave me a busload of hardcover books for joining, then sold me new ones every following month for $3.95 to $4.95.
I also bought some new clothes. My parents paid for my basic attire but there were things I wanted they wouldn’t spring for, either because they couldn’t afford them or they didn’t like the message they broadcast.
I still had money to burn though. And since I wasn’t dating yet, I didn’t have heavy social expenses. So I turned to music. This is when I started listening –really listening, critical listening– to music.
I bought a small record player for my bedroom and my first records –mostly 78s, plus a few 45 Extended Play albums– when I was thirteen.
“Here in My Heart,” 1952, Al Martino.
“How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?,” 1953, Patti Page.
“Botch a Me,” 1952, Rosemary Clooney. 
“Bee-oo, bye-oh, bee-oo, boo / Won’t you botch-a… botch-a-me / Bee-oo, bye-oh, bee-oo, boo / When you botch-a me…” I obviously didn’t buy that one for the lyrics.
“Cry” and “The Little White Cloud That Cried”, 1952, Johnny Ray. I was a sophomore then. Maudlin went over well with me. Most of all, though, I was (1) trying to stay up with, if not ahead of, the musical tastes of my classmates, and (2) listening to music my parents wouldn’t like was a positive for me because how else could I break out with tastes of my own? I even bought the sheet music for “Cloud,” thinking I might sing it somewhere. Some time. Some how. “(Ooh wah) / (Ooh wah) / Ooh wah) / If your sweetheart / Sent a letter of goodbye / It’s no secret / You’ll feel better if you cry…” (The lyrics to “Cry” were even worse.)
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I bought a lot of crap but in my defense, I bought good stuff too. Mostly, it was jazz, a music I didn’t quite understand yet. But it was loud and rhythmic and nobody would mistake it for my parents’ taste in music so I found it appealing.
The first jazz record albums I bought –45 Extended Plays (six minutes of music on a side)- -were Ralph Burns: Free Forms (1952) (a single EP) and a two EP collection of great hits by Duke Ellington –“Chloe,” “The Mooche,””Harlem Airshaft,” etc.
Burns was an arranger and composer, best known for “Summer Sequence,” a musical suite he wrote for Woody Herman’s (Second?) (Third?) Herd in 1948. The next year, in 1949, he added another song to it, “Early Autumn,” it, featuring Stan Getz on tenor: that record jumpstarted Getz’s sky rocket career as a jazz soloist. (A side bar: I was never a great lover of Getz’s playing.) On Burns’s Free Forms, the principal soloists were altoist Lee Konitz, still a favorite of mine and one of the giants of modern jazz, and Burns on piano. Jazz wise, the album was fluff, but the arrangements were intelligent and witty and Konitz’s solos were first class, though a little chiffon-ey.
The Ellington collection was first rate. But what would you expect from the best jazz band in the world and –Ellington/ Strayhorn– the best composers and arrangers in jazz?
Then between thirteen and sixteen, I discovered Stan Kenton. Loud, bombastic music but he had some great soloists too –the Candoli brothers on trumpet, Konitz again, Eddie Safranski on bass. I not only bought a couple of Kenton albums. I bought ten inch Long Play 33s by trombonist Frank Rosolino and a not terribly talented alto sax and clarinet player named Al Belletto, both of whom, for some reason, the Kenton organization and Capitol Records were touting. Rosolino was worth touting. Belletto not all all, except that his sextet doubled vocals and instrumentals, the vocals sounding like not terribly good copies of the Four Freshmen. Cool, but not cool enough.
What happened to those early recordings I bought? I kept the Ellington and Ralph Burns EPs. I also kept, simply because there was room for them in the carry-all for EP records I had acquired, a really basic but not very exciting album of barbershop quartet singing and a 24-minute version of the musical Brigadoon, 
which I loved because (1) it was the first musical I ever saw and (2) I wanted to sing two of the songs from it on stage, “Come to Me, Bend to Me” and “There But For You Go I.” (I eventually did sing “There But For You Go I” on the Showboat Majestic between 1956-58.)
Johnny Ray had been bad enough but my parents knew I ‘d lost it completely when I moved on to jazz, West Coast style, in 1953. (By then, I had a regular job on weekends to fund as many bad habits as I could find.) I fixated on early Dave Brubeck, the ten inch Fantasy albums, but spread out to buy a horrid Cal Tjader trio album as well and two very good Gerry Mulligan albums. When I got to college, Mulligan would be my main squeeze. My first two years, I named my afternoon jazz show on Hiram campus radio after one of his songs, “Westwood Walk.” The last two years, it was “Open Country,” which was also a Mulligan tune.
I didn’t keep either of my Kenton albums, nor the Rosolino set (I probably should have because he really was good) or my two Al Belletto albums.
I kept only one of the early Brubeck albums I bought, a ten-incher called Jazz at Storyville. (Storyville was popular Boston jazz club.) Cal Tjader took a walk too. 
I kept a Paul Desmond quartet album too (Don Elliott on mellophone) which was really cool.
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Maybe here’s where we need to talk about the cost of buying records and going to clubs and concerts.
I left high school with a long play record collection of under twenty-five albums. When I went to college, that made me one of the principal record collectors on campus -it wouldn’t have meant much at a place like Harvard but it did at a place like Hiram College, in backwoods Ohio. I left college four years later with a jazz collection –I had a few non-jazz albums too, but not many– that still totaled under fifty. A year later, a year out of college, it had swelled to a hundred, and it’s erratically but persistently grown since then, probably into the one to two (to three?) thousand range now. The longest downswing came when I was in grad school, ages 29 through 41. Not having any money or free time does that to you.
I finished my dissertation in 1977 and Esther and I separated for a year. It was a rough time for us both, also for Jeremy, who was seven then. I loved for a year with another separated parent that next year and just to survive psychically, I started buying records again. It was 1977, a great time to reenter the jazz world: during my hiatus from heavy buying, I’d missed out on the emergence of free jazz (although I did own some Ornette Coleman, Coltrane’s Ascension album, and two Cecil Taylor albums and four, or was it five?, George Russell albums –also a couple Dolphy albums and one by Don Ellis). But there was all that Chicago stuff –Anthony Braxton, David Murray, Hamiett Bluiett, Leroy Jenkins, the Revolutionary Ensemble, the Creative Construction Company, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Air, the World Saxophone Quartet– and really good new indie albums, like India Navigation, Nessa, Hat hut, and Black Saint. After that I just never stopped, partly because I was earning enough money to indulge myself occasionally again.
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Comparatively speaking, I buy a lot more recorded music now than I did then. Why? Most it’s because adjusted for inflation, records are dirt cheap nowadays. Another reason is that 83, almost 784, I don’t really need a lot of basic stuff anymore because I already have it. What? Another kitchen set? New bed covers? A new vacuum? Even new clothes? Be real. I pretty much have what I will need until I’m gone from here and don’t need anything new any more. (That’s a grim topic. Let’s stop talking about that.) And I have a broad enough base in music now, especially jazz but also to some extent in classical, blues, world and parts of r and b and Motown and even a little rap and hip hop that some of what I pick up now is simply filling in the cracks in my music collection.
I don’t remember what records cost when I was a high school but in the 60’s, LPs cost $1.99 to $2.69 for mono and $2.99 to $3.69 for stereo. Singles were 69 cents. I could go to a club or a concert for $5 plus drinks ($2 a drink, and I didn’t drink that much back then.) But I only earned $4300 as a public school teacher in 1960-61 and $5000 by 1964, and in college, a good week’s earnings for me was $20, most of which went to pay my tuition and fees. Everything’s relative: the low cost of records then was balanced off by my very low earnings.
Since then, club and concert prices have skyrocketed. Even here in provincial Cleveland, when I hit Nighttown or the Bop Stop, the two principal jazz clubs in town, I pay $25-$40 to get in and another $50-$60 or more for drinks and food while there. It’s still a steal. By comparison, my Cleveland Orchestra tickets, for the cheapest seats in the house, cost me $36 to $57 a ticket, depending on when the concert takes place. And in New York, I can’t get out of a club without paying well over a hundred (which is one reason why I don’t go to New York clubs very often anymore). For a retired geezer like me, New York has pretty well priced itself out of my range, no matter how much I like going there.
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But the cost of recordings hasn’t gone up relative to inflation. It’s dropped. Dramatically. Much of the music I want to listen to is now in the public domain, which means no copyright payments to the artists –thus I have four CDs, eight albums, by MJQ pianist-composer John Lewis, and they cost me $20+, and I picked up seven albums of Fats Waller, one of my favorites, for under forty bucks. Another reason is that now you can hunt out used, nearly new albums, or sometimes completely new remainders, at half to two-thirds the original cost by checking out the secondary dealers on Amazon.com. Whatever the reason, when I compare the cost of purchasing a new music CD relative to my current monthly income with the cost of purchasing a Long Play recording in 1960 compared to what little I earned then, the balance tilts heavily in my favor toward today. Current odds favor me eight to one.
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Behind all of this is a switch in the technology of music transmission too.. I buy CDs but they’re already abandoned technology. Soon, at some point in time, they’ll disappear completely from the market. A sign of the change: I elected this year to renew my lease on my Honda for a fourth year primarily because if I traded it in, I wouldn’t be able to get a new car with a CD player in it because none of the new cars have them. CD players are old now. Everything is streaming. I could move to Spottify, but I want my music choices under my control. I want to own the music I listen to. It’s a personal thing.
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(I have no reason to include this final photo except that it gives me an excuse to put another picture of Esther in this blog. She’s been gone for a year and a half now but she’s never gone for me. Here she is, a freshwoman or sophomore in high school, 1956, second row, second from the left. She was just becoming herself then. What a sweetie!)
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MUSIC & ME 