Delmark Records...oldest indie label

[LouieB]

I often recommend a trip to the Jazz Record Mart to out of towners and all Chicagoans who love music, even if they aren't into jazz and blues. Here is a really interesting article from today's New York Times. Even though I have been to the JRM many times (and in several locations) over the years, I still learned a few things about Bob Koester, the owner of Delmark and JRM. There is a great picture of Bob with Mike Bloomfield in this article and a funny if possibly apocryphal story about Iggy Pop too.

 

LouieB

 

 

Happily Seduced by the Blues

By LARRY ROHTER

Chicago

 

BOB KOESTER came here in 1958 because he was a jazz and blues fan who wanted to see his favorite music played live in the small, smoky clubs that dotted the city. But he has ended up doing much more than that: as the founder and sole proprietor of Delmark Records he also became and remains the most dedicated chronicler of that scene, now gradually receding into history.

 

“I was seduced by the music,” Mr. Koester said in an interview last month. “You can’t record everything you like, and I missed a lot of good sessions because I didn’t have the money. But there was so much going on. I liked the music, I liked the label, and I did as much as I could afford to do.”

 

From traditional Dixieland to the farthest reaches of the avant-garde, artists representing nearly every category of jazz have found their way to Delmark, the oldest continually operating independent jazz and blues label in the United States. On the blues side Delmark’s releases have ranged from Mississippi Delta-style acoustic guitarists like Sleepy John Estes and Big Joe Williams to all-electric Chicago ensembles led by Magic Sam, Otis Rush and Luther Allison.

 

Because of those efforts Mr. Koester is one of a handful of nonperformers to have been inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame, in 1996. His influence can be felt in other ways: labels like Alligator, Flying Fish, Rooster, Nessa and Earwig were all founded by former employees, as were Living Blues magazine and numerous blues and folk festivals.

 

“I think you could make a good argument that without Bob Koester there might never have been the white blues movement, certainly not in the United States,” said Bruce Iglauer, president of Alligator Records, who began his career in 1970 as a Delmark shipping clerk. “The fact is that he opened the door for a lot of people, and I don’t think he has ever got the recognition he deserves for being such a seminal figure.”

 

Somewhat belatedly that situation is now being remedied. Delmark has just released a 55th anniversary DVD featuring performances by some of its leading artists, and a recording Mr. Koester produced more than 40 years ago, “Hoodoo Man Blues,” was inducted last year into the Grammy Hall of Fame, alongside pop hits like Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and Pink Floyd’s “Wall.”

 

Born in Wichita, Kan., in 1932, Mr. Koester came to his vocation early, as a teenage collector of 78 r.p.m. discs. He remembers scouring used-furniture stores, Salvation Army warehouses and jukebox suppliers right after World War II, paying 6 cents apiece for recordings of Robert Johnson’s “Me and the Devil” and “Stop Breakin’ Down” that nowadays fetch thousands of dollars each.

 

Delmark was founded while Mr. Koester was in college in St. Louis, and initially specialized in traditional New Orleans-style jazz. But once he arrived in Chicago, his horizons expanded to include avant-garde experimentalists like Sun Ra, whose first two recordings, “Sun Song” and “Sound of Joy,” Delmark now distributes.

 

Since there never was a lot of money in what Delmark was doing, Mr. Koester also operated a record store called the Jazz Record Mart, which continues to do business, on the outskirts of the Chicago Loop. At a time when the mainstream press and record companies were paying little or no attention to the music being played in the city’s taverns, the store soon became a place where Delmark’s artists and other blues and jazz luminaries could gather.

 

“It was a crossroads and clearing house for information, a place where a lot of musicians would come to catch up on the latest news,” recalled the harmonica player, singer and band leader Charlie Musselwhite, who worked as a clerk at the store in the mid-1960s. “Shakey Walter Horton and Ransom Knowling would hang out there, and Sunnyland Slim and Homesick James were always dropping by. You never knew what fascinating characters would wander in, so I always felt like I was in the eye of the storm there.”

 

Eventually prominent rock stars, on the prowl for obscure blues songs to add to their collections or record themselves, also became part of the clientele. Former clerks and customers recall seeing Steve Winwood, Jeff Beck and members of the Rolling Stones, Cream, Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac, Canned Heat and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band shopping in the store.

 

As a purist, though, Mr. Koester disliked pop music and still does — and thus was largely oblivious to their presence. “Afterwards another client would say: That was So-and-So,” Mr. Koester said. “And I would say: ‘Really? How much did he spend?’ ‘Five hundred dollars.’ ‘Oh, well, then tell him to come back.’ ”

 

Opinionated and irascible, Mr. Koester never hesitated to criticize the taste of his customers, even if they were famous. “People ask me, and I’ll tell them,” he said during an interview at the Jazz Record Mart, where he cordially provided advice to a pair of customers vacationing from France who had learned there of his store. “Don’t ask me, and I might tell you anyway.”

 

But with those he sensed shared his devotion to the music he could be quite generous: Mr. Iglauer recalls how, after one of his first days in Chicago, Mr. Koester took him to the Blue Flame and other clubs, where he met Junior Wells and Lefty Dizz. “It was like I discovered a parallel universe, and Bob was the tour guide,” Mr. Iglauer said.

 

The future Iggy Pop was another blues aficionado whom Mr. Koester took under his wing, until the night that Iggy and his pals Scott and Ron Asheton got drunk and rowdy at Mr. Koester’s apartment. He threw them out on the street, telling them, or so the story goes, “You guys are a bunch of stooges,” the name they adopted for the band they decided to form that same night.

 

Delmark’s most famous blues release is Mr. Wells’s “Hoodoo Man Blues,” which Mr. Koester produced. Two generations of blues bands have covered nearly every song on that recording, which the All Music Guide describes as “one of the truly classic blues albums of the 1960s” and “absolutely mesmerizing” in its ability to transfer onto tape the feeling of a live performance by a working Chicago blues band.

 

“Bob told us, ‘Play me a record just like you played last night in the club,’ and that’s exactly what we did,” Buddy Guy, the guitarist on the record, said recently. “Over at Chess,” Chicago’s main blues label in those days, “you’d come in, and the producers would try to teach you how to play, or would tell you to turn your amp down. But Bob didn’t want that. He wanted to hear us being ourselves.”

 

During that same 1965 session, Mr. Guy also recalled, his amplifier broke. With Mr. Koester worried about the cost of studio time, the recording engineer had Mr. Guy play through the Leslie speaker cabinet of a Hammond B-3 organ in the studio while the amplifier was being repaired. That technique, with its thick swirling sound, was later popularized by the Beatles on “Let It Be” and by Cream, Led Zeppelin and other British rock groups whose guitarists admired Mr. Guy.

 

“We were like Thomas Edison, except we had no awareness of the importance of what we were doing,” Mr. Guy said with a chuckle. “When we came in that morning, there were bottles of whiskey and wine on the floor, so we were just having fun, like we were at Theresa’s,” the South Side bar where the Wells-Guy quartet was often the house band.

 

That casual, hands-off approach is typical of Mr. Koester’s production style and is one of the reasons that musicians have gravitated toward him. “I don’t tell the artist what to play, and I don’t try to change their sound,” he said. “I’m a documentarian basically, a producer more in the Hollywood sense of that word than in the record-business sense.”

 

Thanks to that attitude and its early championing of the Chicago collective known as the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, Delmark has also become a force in the more cerebral world of avant-garde jazz. The label issued the first albums of the pianist Muhal Richard Abrams, who founded the collective, and members of what later became the Art Ensemble of Chicago at a time when their work was considered so offbeat and harsh on the ear as to be unmarketable.

 

“These recordings caught people who made quite an impact on the musical world, like Roscoe Mitchell and Joseph Jarman, at a very early stage of their careers,” said the trombonist George E. Lewis, a member who is also the author of the book “A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music” and a professor of music at Columbia University. “Taken together they placed the AACM on the map internationally and made Chicago a renowned destination for a certain type of music. Those aren’t minor things for a small independent label.”

 

But the most influential of Delmark’s association recordings may also have been its most implausible. Released in 1968 as a double album, Anthony Braxton’s “For Alto” is a collection of thorny solo saxophone compositions, initially slammed as an affront to the jazz tradition but which has gone on to influence a generation of horn players and inspire scores of similar solo outings. The recent Penguin Guide to Jazz calls it “one of the genuinely important American recordings” that “challenged every parameter of the music, tonal, textural, rhythmic and structural.”

 

Mr. Koester said: “Braxton’s prior record, his first, had moved only 200 copies the first year, so I knew I was going to have trouble selling a double record set of totally unaccompanied saxophone. But I don’t pay that much attention to sales figures. You put them out and hope for the best.” The label’s biggest success is still “Hoodoo Man Blues,” which he said sells about 6,000 copies a year.

 

Mr. Koester complains a bit about the focus on his label’s renowned back catalog because, as he notes, “we’re still making records, even if the general press isn’t paying attention.” Delmark’s current roster includes association members like the saxophonists Fred Anderson and Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, the flutist Nicole Mitchell and the percussionist Kahil El’Zabar, as well as female blues singers like Big Time Sarah, Zora Young and Shirley Johnson.

 

“Junior is gone, Magic Sam is gone, Luther Allison is gone,” Mr. Koester said, somewhat wistfully. “But there’s still some pretty good talent around town, so it still goes on.”

 

Business is bad for record companies these days, but then again it was never terribly lucrative for Mr. Koester even in the best of times. But at least he has the record store and a recording studio — where microphones, tape machines and instruments originally from Chess Studios are now installed — to continue to underwrite his unending quest to record the music he regards as vital and in danger of being overlooked.

 

“Bob has always just followed his gut and his heart,” Mr. Iglauer said. “He has never sat down and asked, ‘How am I going to make money on this?’ Never ever. It was always, ‘This deserves to be recorded, and so I’m going to record it.’ He has always put his money where his ears are.”

[Analogman]

Speaking of The Blues, and Chicago, I saw this last night:

 

ZZ TOP — the major rock band that holds the record for the most enduring lineup of all original members — had the audience on their feet as they celebrated their 40 year anniversary with an episode of "VH1 Storytellers" taped at Chicago's Congress Theatre on March 31. Fans can watch this exclusive performance when "VH1 Storytellers: ZZ Top" premieres Saturday, June 27 at 10:00 PM on VH1 and will air on VH1 Classic and Palladia, MTV Networks' high-definition music channel on Saturday, July 4 at 9:00 p.m.

 

The Texas trio answer questions from the audience, renew one couple's wedding vows, and tell the stories behind such hits as "La Grange" (about the real "Best Little Whorehouse in Texas") and "Sharp Dressed Man" (during the song's video shoot a homeless person started critiquing everything on the set and band and crew went on to follow his advice). Also in the hour, guitarist Billy F Gibbons talks about the band's travails as opening act for Janis Joplin and bassist Dusty Hill shows off his Walter Brennan imitation.

 

In addition to the hits noted above, the episode will feature the band revealing the inspiration and stories behind such classic hits as "Just Got Paid", "Jesus Just Left Chicago", "Gimme All Your Lovin'" and "Tush".

 

"VH1 Storytellers: ZZ Top" is a production of VH1. Patrizia DiMaria produces with Lee Rolontz and Bill Flanagan serving as executive producers.

 

Maybe they went to that record store while they were there.

[LouieB]

Speaking of The Blues, and Chicago, I saw this last night:

 

 

 

Maybe they went to that record store while they were there.

I would not be surprised...

 

LouieB