Collectibles

Jazz Musician Photograph Archive, ca. 1945

Appraisal: Jazz Musician Photograph Archive, ca. 1945

Transcript

GUEST: These all came from my grandfather, at a photography studio in Cleveland in the '40s and '50s. And it was a pretty big jazz scene in Cleveland, so, I mean, I don't know all the details, but he got to work with and he got to know a lot of the jazz musicians and all the famous names of that time period.

APPRAISER: Your grandfather had a photo studio in Cleveland…

GUEST: Right…

APPRAISER: …but why did he choose to shoot all of these? Did someone pay him for it or...?

GUEST: You know, I'm not really sure. We don't know all the stories, so it's hard to say. I think he might have done studio work for the musicians and then maybe he just liked to hang out with them and get more candid stuff. I don't really know the whole background.

APPRAISER: So one of the really interesting things, there are a lot of photographers who covered the jazz era, but they didn't all have all of those people sign their photographs. And what we have here just in photographs is 360, approximately, signed photographs, all of jazz legends. And what I love a lot is that your grandfather is right here with your grandmother. Right. And they actually are having Warren “Baby” Dodds, who was a New Orleans jazz drummer.

GUEST: Okay.

APPRAISER: He was actually the brother of Johnny Dodds who was a famous clarinetist.

GUEST: Okay.

APPRAISER: So he's there signing. In so many of these pictures in the stacks here, your grandfather's all over the place. And we see in other images where he actually has the white ink that he would take with him, as we see Billie Holiday signed these two in white ink. And you can see them using his little ink, which is amazing.

GUEST: Yeah.

APPRAISER: In addition to all of this, we have your slide collection.

GUEST: Right.

APPRAISER: So here we have in this container here, in these drawers, and over here about 150 of these glass stereo slides.

GUEST: Right.

APPRAISER: And the one that we have showing, I love them because they're very candid images of some of jazz's greatest legends, and here we have Louis Armstrong sitting in a restaurant talking with a rib bone in his hand, just gesturing away, which is pretty fantastic.

GUEST: Yeah, I mean a lot of the images are... some of them up on stage performing, but a lot of them hanging out at the tables, having the dinner or the clubs afterwards and just, you know, socializing.

APPRAISER: So he became personal friends with them.

GUEST: Yeah.

APPRAISER: And he developed this relationship even outside the jazz clubs or...?

GUEST: Yeah, yeah, he must've. We heard stories about, you know, a lot of these people coming to the farm on the off time, and Louis Armstrong particularly was over there all the time, a close friend of the family. And I don't know how many others.

APPRAISER: And your dad, did he ever get to meet any of these people or...

GUEST: Yeah, my dad, when he was young, we saw pictures. Some of the pictures of my dad when he's young, like five, six, seven years old, is running around with Louis Armstrong and with the horses and stuff like that, yeah.

APPRAISER: That's amazing. So you know, like every kid, they just hang out with Louis Armstrong when they're growing up.

GUEST: Right, right, yeah, it just happens.

APPRAISER: There's historic value here because he didn't publish any of these.

GUEST: Right.

APPRAISER: He took them because he loved to, and obviously he had an assistant, because he's in some of them, so he couldn't have taken them. But he documented things people have never seen before, shows that may never have been documented. So we can only imagine if you were to really research how much historic value there is in this. But if we talk about market value, what I found particularly interesting with your collection is that Billie Holiday was not a very common signer. Her photographs sell anywhere between $1,000, $2,000 per piece.

GUEST: Wow.

APPRAISER: You have 11 Billie Holiday signed photos, and they're all amazing. I picked two.

GUEST: Yeah.

APPRAISER: You have multiple Nat King Cole. I think you have 12 Tony Bennetts from back in the era.

GUEST: Tony Bennett, yeah.

APPRAISER: You have multiples of Louis Armstrong. So in addition to the ones I'm showing here, there are so many more in here that are also of great value. That combined with all of these slides that no one has ever seen before. I think what's extraordinarily conservative, to say that your archive for what we have right here is between $50,000 and $75,000 at auction.

GUEST: Okay.

APPRAISER: And you have more of these at home. How many more do you have?

GUEST: Yeah. We have almost 2,000 slides total. I think it was like 1,960, somewhere in that range.

APPRAISER: So we're looking at a very small percentage of your slide collection?

GUEST: This is just part of the collection. We didn't bring it all.

APPRAISER: I think if we were to add all the other slides you have at home, I think, again, it would be very conservative that for all of this, plus the other slides, I think easily $80,000 to $120,000 for... And that's at auction. So if you're going to insure it, it would be probably more like $200,000 to $300,000 worth of...

GUEST: Yeah, that's really cool.

APPRAISER: ...rare jazz material.

GUEST: Yeah, that's awesome.