[JPL] BOB KOESTER: Happily Seduced by the Blues

[Dr. Jazz]

June 28, 2009
Music


  Happily Seduced by the Blues

By LARRY ROHTER 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/larry_rohter/index.html?inline=nyt-per>

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 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/g/grammy_awards/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier> 
Hall of Fame, alongside pop hits like Michael Jackson's "Thriller" and 
Pink Floyd 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/p/pink_floyd/index.html?inline=nyt-org>'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 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/s/salvation_army/index.html?inline=nyt-org> 
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 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/r/rolling_stones/index.html?inline=nyt-org>, 
Cream, Led Zeppelin 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/l/led_zeppelin/index.html?inline=nyt-org>, 
Fleetwood Mac 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/f/fleetwood_mac/index.html?inline=nyt-org>, 
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 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/iggy_pop/index.html?inline=nyt-per> 
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 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/b/beatles_the/index.html?inline=nyt-org> 
on "Let It Be" and by Cream, Led Zeppelin and other British rock groups 
whose guitarists admired Mr. Guy.

"We were like Thomas Edison 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/e/thomas_a_edison/index.html?inline=nyt-per>, 
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 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/columbia_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org>. 
"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."


Copyright 2009 
<http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html> The New 
York Times Company <http://www.nytco.com/>

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