Jazz on the Block

Arlan Ettinger likes stuff. Even more than that, he likes getting stuff together and selling it to the highest bidder. From baseballs to pre-Castro Cuban cigars to Jerry Garcia's guitar to JFK's old briefcase, Ettinger has hawked it all.

His auction house, Guernsey's, will sell again on Sunday. This time it's jazz. John Coltrane's horns. Benny Goodman's clarinet. Thelonious Monk's smoking jacket. A 32-page letter written by Louis Armstrong, rife with gleeful and erratic underlining of phrases like "Bid Name Ass holes."

Ettinger speaks ebulliently of the auction. "Here in almost every instance, the 400 or so lots have come from the family of deceased musicians, [things] often found in their home. They couldn't be fresher to the world than this."

They probably also couldn't be more affordable. A majority of items do not have a reserve, or pre-set price minimum, which means this will not be "purely an elitist sale," according to Ettinger. "With Coltrane, when you have 40 or 50 lots, it makes them more affordable." Affordable, of course, is relative in the auction world-Guernsey's sold Mark McGuire's 70th homerun baseball for just over $3 million in 1999. But Guernsey has also auctioned smaller items, such as presidential memorabilia, for a couple thousand dollars.

"It really doesn't matter where [the price] starts, just where it ends," says Ettinger. And where it ends is the magic number that will make many of these items unattainable to all but the very wealthy. This is what has some jazz historians concerned about the auction.

"From the point of view of a jazz scholar, if something's in private hands, if it becomes a fetish, it's not likely that people are going to have complete access to it," says Bruce Boyd Raeburn, curator of the Hogan Jazz Archives at Tulane University. "An acquisitions budget is something quite rare in the archival world."

The museums and archives that preserve, protect and study America's jazz legacy must depend on the kindness of strangers. Not even the Smithsonian, the biggest museum of them all, can afford to participate this weekend, says John Hasse, curator of American music at the National Museum of American History.

"We rely on generosity and [the] public-spiritedness of the families who want to make a public gift to the nation and who want to have their materials in a place of great prestige, a place that will take the utmost care with them and where they will be readily available," he says, adding that Congress gives his museum no money for acquisitions.

"I got the catalog," said Deborah Gillaspie of the Chicago Jazz Archive. "There's really wonderful stuff, but I don't have any money. This stuff is going into private collections."

Many of the items on sale for this week would make the average jazz fan yawn. Gerry Mulligan's address books, for example. Or Barbra Streisand's performance contracts (how did those get in there?). There's even an essay about beer by one Thelonius Monk written in February 1932, for a class at Stuyvesant High School. These are the bits and pieces that make up someone's life, the ephemera that complete the life portraits for scholars and biographers. Many archivists find it distressing that so many of these pieces-items that are part of America's shared cultural trust-will remain hidden from view.

Archivists also worry about maintenance. Museums and libraries are experts at caring for documents, but what happens when these bits and pieces crumble to dust in some executive's summer house?

"Preservation is always an issue," says Gillaspie. But, she's quick to add, "there's always the hope that [items] will end up in the hands of someone who knows what it is. Stuff in the South Side of Chicago goes in the trash every day, because people don't know who's in the photos. At least with these materials, people will know what they are."

Raeburn, of Tulane, finds some comfort in the idea that "if the content and information is out there, possession of the item is not the whole story." He's taken a look at the Guernsey's catalog and found that "certain things that are in those lots have been available already."

If possession is nine-tenths of the law, access is the whole thing for archivists. Michael Cogswell, director of the Louis Armstrong House and Archives in Queens, hopes that whoever wins the bidding shares their spoils with scholars. "It would be disappointing if some of the materials on auction were to go to a private collection and remain inaccessible from then on. I would hope that any private collectors make them available to scholars and researchers. It's likely to happen. I certainly hope that it happens," he says.

Hasse at the Smithsonian has his doubts. "It could happen. I wish it would happen. I've been here 20 years, and I've never seen that happen with music."

Complicating the matter is jazz's large and appreciative foreign fan base in countries like France or Japan, worsening prospects for American museums. With a foreign buyer, "it's unlikely that stuff will end up in archives," says Gillaspie.

Gillaspie is confident most of the lots will end up where they belong-with her and her colleagues. "The private collector buys it. They enjoy it. They pass away and no one knows what to do with it. Eventually it will make its way to archives."

In case it doesn't, Cogswell at the Louis Armstrong House and Archives has a backup plan: "We are hoping to acquire some material from the auction. I have a funder who is going to try to bid on things and then donate them to us."

In the meantime, items are available for public viewing on Feb. 18 and 19 from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. at Jazz at Lincoln Center.