The Geoffrey A. Wheeler Collection is an archive that represents a lifelong pursuit of recordings of jazz music and a love of jazz history. We are delighted to share his collection so others can enjoy and learn from his life’s work of researching and collecting jazz recordings.

Geoffrey Wheeler was born in 1936 and passed away in 2020. He grew up in Newton, Massachusetts and graduated from UCLA. He spent his career in writing, editing, and publishing, but the major love of his life was jazz music. He spent many years intensively researching jazz history, hunting for records, cataloging his purchases, carefully cleaning, playing, and archiving his now-substantial collection of jazz 78s and LPs.

Geoffrey lived in New York City in the 1950’s and 1960’s and got to experience a lot of amazing live jazz. He was also an amateur jazz drummer, and took drum lessons from Philly Joe Jones, who helped boost his jazz record collecting. In Geoffrey’s own words:

“In the Fall of 1958, I began drum lessons with Philly Joe Jones, who lived in Brooklyn. I had met him at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem. At some point, he told me Riverside was discounting its records at the warehouse. I went over and bought as many I could afford at around $1.00 each. They were all new. I also began buying LPs at Sam Goody, E. J. Korvette’s, Liberty Music, two stores in the Village, and several other stores in Midtown and on the West Side. Two record guys I got to know were Jeff Atterton at Goody’s West Side store, and Harry Lim (formerly of Keynote and HL Records) at the East Side Third Avenue store. He worked downstairs. One day while browsing the bins upstairs, I met Hal McKusick looking for Lester Young LPs. I picked out several for him. Hal lived on the North Fork of Long Island and knew my mother-in-law.”

Along the way, Geoffrey became the President of the International Association of Jazz Record Collectors (IAJRC) for many years. He wrote and self-published several books, including Jazz By Mail - Record Clubs and Record Labels 1936-1958 and Columbia Records - Pioneer in Recorded Sound - America’s Oldest Record Company: 1886 to the Present (two volumes: History and Documents). He was working on a new book at the end of his life, which remains unfinished.

You can find more about this collection and his personal collecting stories in his book Jazz By Mail - Record Clubs and Record Labels 1936-1958.