He takes me to the deck of the second of his three chalets, where he has a vintage binocular telescope on a tripod. He aims it at a clutch of houses several hundred meters away and focuses. We sit on the deck and Claude opens a bottle of champagne as we contemplate the panorama. I could be living in some hole with nothing. But my biggest passion is to share all this.
Sharing is essential.
Preserving is also what the chalet is about. He admits that he doesn't have time to listen to more than a tiny fraction of his collection. I know where they are. Good thing he does. When Atlantic Records decided to reissue their greatest jazz albums on CD to mark the company's 50th anniversary, they remastered several of them from Claude's mint-condition vinyls because the original tapes had been lost or destroyed.