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      Jazz Musicians Unite With One Goal: Celebrating Frank Kimbrough

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      The underrecognized pianist died suddenly last December. On Friday, his peers and former students will release a tribute album featuring nearly 60 of his pieces.A couple of months ago, as the long, lean era of pandemic stillness was just beginning to open to new possibilities, some of the finest jazz musicians in New York could be found shuffling in and out of a Lower East Side recording studio as if through a revolving door. At one point, several of them — including the saxophonist Donny McCaslin, the trumpeter Ron Horton and the pianist Craig Taborn — delved into a wistful composition titled “Regeneration,” giving it all the supple dynamism of a banner rippling in the breeze.Along one wall of the studio was a framed photograph of the song’s composer, the pianist Frank Kimbrough, who died suddenly at the end of last year, at 64. His sly smile in the portrait, conveying a benevolent skepticism, felt well suited to the project underway: an elaborate tribute featuring nearly 60 of his pieces interpreted by more than 65 of his associates, including former students and distinguished peers. Amounting to more than five and a half hours of music, this ambitious release is available on Friday digitally and on streaming services from Newvelle Records, which usually focuses exclusively on premium vinyl.Within a musical landscape defined by relationships, Kimbrough operated as both a connector and an outlier. “He just had a 360 view of things, and a completely open mind on the scene,” said the alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins, who took part in the sessions. “The folks who knew him really loved him,” he added, “but even among musicians, there are a lot of people who don’t know his name.”Ron Horton, left, and Michael Blake. “Frank was modest about his composing,” Horton said.Anna YatskevichA grand gesture on behalf of an underrecognized figure, “Kimbrough” looks from one angle like the culmination of a lifetime’s accumulated good will. As a pianist, Kimbrough was prolific and widely admired but best known for a lasting tenure with the Maria Schneider Orchestra; his precise, perceptive accompaniment helped shape that ensemble’s expressive sound, up to and including “Data Lords,” the most critically acclaimed jazz album of 2020. As an educator, Kimbrough left behind a deep legacy of mentorship, most recently in the prestigious Jazz Studies program at the Juilliard School.Elan Mehler, a pianist who studied with him during an earlier stint at New York University, co-founded Newvelle about six years ago, and invited Kimbrough to record its inaugural release. That album, “Meantime,” paired him with a handful of younger players like the trumpeter Riley Mulherkar, who had just completed a masters at Juilliard. Fittingly, all of the proceeds from “Kimbrough” will go toward the Frank Kimbrough Jazz Scholarship there, established by his widow, the singer Maryanne de Prophetis.Mehler conceived the tribute with an intergenerational ideal in mind, arranging his rotating cast so that barely any tracks have the same personnel. “I had multiple spreadsheets, color-coded by musician,” he said during a break in the session. “I’ve never fallen as deeply into anything as I fell into this project. I’d be up until two, three in the morning just putting bands together and then playing the songs with headphones on the keyboard, and changing it, flipping it around, and then falling asleep and dreaming about it.”In addition to Mehler and Taborn, the pianists on the new set include Fred Hersch, who knew Kimbrough as a contemporary, and Isaiah J. Thompson, who had him as an instructor — along with an honor roll of others, like Gary Versace, Helen Sung, Dan Tepfer, Elio Villafranca and Jacob Sacks. Like everyone involved in the project, they donated their services, creating not only a stirring homage but also a snapshot of a uniquely transitional time.Elan Mehler is a pianist who studied with Kimbrough and the co-founder of Newvelle Records, the label releasing “Kimbrough.”Cody O’Loughlin for The New York Times“If it wasn’t this moment where everybody’s ready to finally play music again, but not yet touring, this wouldn’t have been able to happen,” Mehler said. “Just the fact that everybody’s in the same city is crazy.”As a compendium of Kimbrough’s music, the Newvelle release also stakes a serious claim for his legacy as a composer — something that took even Mehler somewhat by surprise. When he first started mapping out the project, he consulted with de Prophetis about material. They asked Horton, an experienced archivist, to assemble a book of Kimbrough compositions. He ended up compiling more than 90 of them.“Frank was modest about his composing,” Horton said during a session break. “But those of us who knew him, going back 40 years, knew he was very special as a composer.”Moments earlier, Horton had demonstrated the point while recording a ballad titled “Noumena,” with a hymnlike calm that spiraled into agitated abstraction. The guitarist Ben Monder imparted a barbed edge with his pedal effects, as Horton and McCaslin jostled around the melody. Their performance was a vibrant extrapolation of Kimbrough’s original design — charged with a spirit of freedom, as he’d meant it to be.Kimbrough took his stewardship of the jazz tradition seriously: his final and most ambitious release, in 2018, was “Monk’s Dreams: The Complete Compositions of Thelonious Sphere Monk.” (It was issued as a six-CD boxed set, for which I wrote liner notes.) What Kimbrough prized most highly as a musician was a sense of unfolding mystery and slippery lyricism — qualities he associated with Monk and a few other personal touchstones, like the drummer Paul Motian, the keyboardist Annette Peacock and the pianists Andrew Hill and Paul Bley.For a period starting in the early 1990s, Kimbrough performed and recorded extensively with the Jazz Composers Collective, founded by the bassist Ben Allison. Though it was created to spotlight new music by its members, the collective had its most visible success story in the Herbie Nichols Project — a repertory group and reclamation project focused on another of Kimbrough’s piano heroes, featuring Horton and Allison, among others.From left, Dave Douglas, Joe Lovano and and Craig Taborn. Some musicians who played at the sessions were rekindling fruitful associations. Others were meeting for the first time.Anna YatskevichThe pianist Helen Sung in the studio.Anna YatskevichThe saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins.Anna YatskevichSpeaking in a studio hallway before he joined Horton and others for a raucous take on “TMI,” Allison marveled at the impromptu community that had formed around Kimbrough: “Elan’s organizing the sessions, but it’s his musicality and what he did as an artist that coalesces other musicians like moths around a flame,” he said. “And for the decades that I knew him and worked with him, we talked a lot about that: how to bring people together around an idea.”The saxophonist Joe Lovano — who recorded a moving “Elegy for P.M.” in a first-time encounter with Taborn and Monder — raised a similar point in reference to Kimbrough’s compositions. “Each one is an idea,” Lovano said, “and has a sound.” Another of the pieces he played was “727,” with Taborn, the trumpeter Dave Douglas, the bassist John Hébert and the drummer Clarence Penn. On the page, this piece involved minimal instruction; in the hands of these musicians, it bloomed.“What’s there in the song, it’s the essential information,” reflected Taborn after the take, describing Kimbrough as a composer attuned to the intuition of seasoned improvisers. “It’s clearly reductive of a larger scheme. He’s asking, ‘What’s the thing that needs to be here that makes this phrase happen?’ And then everything else is stripped away.”Lovano and Donny McCaslin. “Each one is an idea,” Lovano said, of Kimbrough’s compositions, “and has a sound.”Anna YatskevichWhat’s remarkable about “Kimbrough” is how fully the songs are realized, almost invariably in a first take, by unexpected groupings of musicians. Among the many highlights are a gently drifting “A&J,” with Alexa Tarantino on alto saxophone, Tepfer on piano, Rufus Reid on bass and Matt Wilson on drums; “Quiet as It’s Kept,” featuring Mulherkar and the pianist Samora Pinderhughes; “Eventualities,” with its collegial sparring between McCaslin and Wilkins; and an authoritative read on “Quickening” by Kimbrough’s piano protégé Micah Thomas, with Allison and the drummer Jeff Williams.Some of these musicians were rekindling fruitful associations for the first time in years. Others were meeting for the first time on the studio floor. After such a long period of isolation, apart from any semblance of a living scene, those connections felt all the more sustaining and vital. “Hearing everybody come together around this music is very gratifying,” Allison, who knew Kimbrough as well as anyone involved, said in a studio hallway.Public recognition had never come easily to Kimbrough, who loathed artistic compromise as much as he did musical cliché. What would he have thought about so many musicians coming together in his honor? Allison flinched, as if the question had knocked the wind out of him. He fell silent for more than 15 seconds before he could form a choked reply: “I’m sure he’d love it.” More

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      The Enduring Appeal of Italian Composers’ Dramatic ‘Library Music’

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      Compositions made from the 1960s through the ’80s to soundtrack films and ads have found new homes on hip-hop tracks and compilations. New artists have been inspired, too.One day in the summer of 2011, Lorenzo Fabrizi rode with a friend to an abandoned warehouse far outside of Rome. The custodian of the building, who said he had bought it for around $100, let them inside to look at its contents: 10,000 vinyl LPs, by Fabrizi’s estimate. They were welcome to take as many they wanted, the owner said; he was brewing beer in the space and had no use for them. More

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      Taylor Swift’s ‘Evermore’ Vaults to No. 1 With a Vinyl Bump

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      Taking advantage of a Billboard chart tweak in how the sales of physical albums are counted, the singer-songwriter’s six-month-old album returned to the top.On the Friday before Memorial Day, Taylor Swift noted on social media that the vinyl version of her nearly six-month-old album “Evermore” was finally available. Pictured in her post lying in the grass with her LP, Swift informed her fans, “You can get it at your fav indie record store, Target, Walmart & Amazon.”To those following the ever-changing target that is Billboard’s chart rules, it was a signal to look out for the next No. 1.Indeed, “Evermore” returns to the top slot on the magazine’s latest chart, rising 73 spots to notch its fourth time at No. 1. In the most recent week, “Evermore” had the equivalent of 202,000 sales in the United States. Of those, 192,000 were for copies sold as a complete package, including 102,000 vinyl LPs, according to MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking arm.It set a record for weekly vinyl sales — at least since 1991, when the charts first came to be informed by hard data (rather than record store surveys, which were fuzzy at best, and often manipulated). Over the last 30 years, the album with the best weekly vinyl sales was “Lazaretto” by Jack White, one of the format’s most zealous champions, which moved 40,000 copies in its opening week in 2014.How did Swift do it? The intimate, indie-folk-esque “Evermore” — Swift’s second surprise release during the pandemic — is certainly a hit, and marked an important moment in her career and creative development. (Her first quarantine release, “Folklore,” won the Grammy for album of the year.)But “Evermore” also benefited from a recent tweak to Billboard’s rules over how it counts the sale of vinyl records on its charts.Vinyl versions of new albums are often delayed by months, the result of production bottlenecks in the small network of pressing plants. When fans order LPs from an artist’s website, they are often sent a digital copy while waiting for the physical one to arrive. Until October, the first version to reach a fan — in those cases, the digital download — was what was counted on the chart. Now, the sale is counted when the version they ordered is shipped.When announced, that rule looked as though it might upset the marketing plans of artists who sell significant amounts of vinyl. But with “Evermore,” Swift was essentially able to amass nearly six months of pre-orders, which were counted in full once the LP was released.According to Billboard, about 71 percent of the current week’s album sales for “Evermore” came from “web-based sellers,” including Swift’s online store. In addition to the vinyl sales, 69,000 copies of “Evermore” were sold on CD, some newly autographed by Swift. (The album had just 12.4 million streams, the least for a No. 1 album since AC/DC’s “Power Up,” which opened in November with 7.8 million.)The return of “Evermore” to No. 1 robbed Olivia Rodrigo’s debut, “Sour,” of a second week at the top after a blockbuster opening. “Sour” had the equivalent of 186,000 sales, down just 37 percent from its first week, and lands in second place.Also this week, J. Cole’s “The Off-Season” is No. 3, Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” is No. 4 and Moneybagg Yo’s “A Gangsta’s Pain” is No. 5.DMX’s posthumous release, “Exodus,” opened at No. 8. More

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      Joel Chadabe, Explorer of Electronic Music’s Frontier, Dies at 82

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      As both a composer and an advocate, Mr. Chadabe devoted himself to what one music critic called the “marriage between humans and their computers.”Joel Chadabe, a composer who helped pioneer electronic music in the 1960s, later developing compositional software programs and founding the Electronic Music Foundation, an advocacy organization for electronic music, died on May 2 at his home in Albany, N.Y. He was 82.His wife, Françoise Chadabe, said the cause was ampullary cancer, a rare form similar to pancreatic cancer.In 1965, when Mr. Chadabe was 27 and computer music was in its nascence, he was asked by the State University of New York at Albany to run its electronic music studio. He had recently graduated from Yale’s music school, and his sensibilities lay with jazz and opera, but he needed a job, so he accepted. From his perch at the university, Mr. Chadabe began to explore the wonders of making music with machines.“I took to it, I think, because for me it was the frontier,” he said in a 2013 interview with the University of Minnesota. “It was the new frontier of music, and I saw unlimited possibilities.”Early on, Mr. Chadabe (pronounced CHA-da-bee) commissioned Bob Moog, who had just started developing a commercial synthesizer, to build one for the studio. He could initially afford only part of the synthesizer (which he powered with a car battery), but after securing enough funding he asked Mr. Moog to create what he called a “super synthesizer.” The result, known as CEMS (Coordinated Electronic Music Studio), was a system that filled an entire room at the university and offered a vast range of sonic capabilities. Students were soon lining up to experiment with it.Before long, Mr. Chadabe found himself mesmerized by the machine as well. At night, he would wait for the campus to clear out so that he could sequester himself with the synthesizer, twisting its knobs to generate soundscapes. He went on to compose electronic music prolifically and to release several experimental albums, including “After Some Songs” (1995), which featured his abstractions of jazz standards, and “Many Times …” (2004).Mr. Chadabe hosted concerts at the university, to which he invited avant-garde composers like Alvin Lucier and Julius Eastman to perform works. In 1972, John Cage visited the studio to tape “Bird Cage,” a sound collage that featured shrill chirps that he had recorded in aviaries. Mr. Chadabe also acquired an early Synclavier for the school, a digital synthesizer that was later used by artists like Kraftwerk, Depeche Mode and Genesis.Reviewing a 1983 concert performance in The New York Times, Bernard Holland wrote, “Mr. Chadabe seemed everywhere to be asking gentle, unassertive questions about who will lead and who will follow in this new marriage between humans and their computers, about how fully and how well people will cope with the potential riches and intimidating complexities of this newest addition to our family of musical instruments.”In the 1980s, Mr. Chadabe began developing compositional software programs that musicians could use to make electronic music at home. He founded a company called Intelligent Music, which released programs like M, Jam Factory and UpBeat, which the band New Order used in recording its 1989 album, “Technique.”In 1994, he formed the Electronic Music Foundation, a nonprofit organization that sought to increase public awareness of electronic music. The group presented concerts and festivals; had a record label that released work by composers including Cage, Laurie Spiegel and Iannis Xenakis; and maintained an online CD store.“A lot of important people in the electronic scene weren’t exactly high profile in terms of the public, but Joel was incredibly interconnected with the community, and he reached a lot of people with the Electronic Music Foundation,” said Kyle Gann, who was the longtime new-music critic for The Village Voice. “He had a tremendous underground influence.”Mr. Chadabe in 1993, a year before he formed the Electronic Music Foundation, a nonprofit organization that sought to increase public awareness of computerized music.Seth McBrideAs artists like Daft Punk and the Chemical Brothers enjoyed mainstream success in the 1990s, Mr. Chadabe felt it was vital to document electronic music’s history while its pioneers were still alive. He published the book “Electric Sound: The Past and Promise of Electronic Music,” which featured more than 150 interviews with figures like Mr. Moog, the composers Milton Babbitt, Pierre Henry and Éliane Radigue, and Ikutaro Kakehashi, the founder of the Roland Corporation and an architect of MIDI. (Inevitably, Mr. Chadabe’s own contributions were also included.)While he interviewed his subjects, Mr. Chadabe tried to divine what precisely it was that had compelled them all to make music with machines.“In writing the book I asked people, ‘Why do you use electronics?’” he recalled in his University of Minnesota interview. “One of the answers that I received mostly was. ‘To make any sound.’”Joel Avon Chadabe was born on Dec. 12, 1938, in the Bronx and grew up in the Throgs Neck neighborhood. His father, Solon, was a lawyer. His mother, Sylvia (Cohen) Chadabe, was a homemaker.Joel attended the private Bentley School in Manhattan and studied classical piano. His parents hoped that he would become a lawyer, but instead he studied music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, graduating in 1959. At Yale, he studied with the composer Elliott Carter, and after he acquired a master’s in 1962, he continued his studies with Mr. Carter in Italy. He was in Rome when he heard about an unusual job opening at SUNY Albany.In addition to his wife, he is survived by a son, Benjamin, and a sister, Susan Strzemien.As he grew older, Mr. Chadabe became a passionate environmentalist, and in 2006 he started the Ear to the Earth music festival, which featured performances of electronic music themed around nature. At the festival in New York that year, one composition included the rustling of pine beetles, and another utilized a soundscape of the city’s pigeons.Mr. Chadabe retired from SUNY Albany in the late 1990s but continued to teach electronic music courses at the Manhattan School of Music, New York University and Bennington College, where he had been teaching as an adjunct since the 1970s.Well into his 70s, Mr. Chadabe remained tantalized by the possibilities of electronic music, whose potential he felt was only just being understood.“Electronics has opened up an amazing world of sound, and more than just an amazing world of sound, an amazing way to understand sound,” he said in 2013. “We are really just beginning to get a good handle on how sound works and how we can transform it.” More

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      Roger Hawkins, Drummer Heard on Numerous Hits, Is Dead at 75

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      An innately soulful musician, he recorded with Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett and many others and was an architect of what became known as the Muscle Shoals sound.Roger Hawkins in performance in 1973. He was member of the band Traffic at the time, but he was best known as a studio musician.Brian Cooke/RedfernsRoger Hawkins, who played drums on numerous pop and soul hits of the 1960s and ’70s and was among the architects of the funky sound that became identified with Muscle Shoals, Ala., died on Thursday at his home in Sheffield, Ala. He was 75.His death was confirmed by his friend and frequent musical collaborator David Hood, who said Mr. Hawkins had been suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and other conditions.An innately soulful musician, Mr. Hawkins initially distinguished himself in the mid-’60s as a member of the house band at the producer Rick Hall’s FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Ala. (The initials stand for Florence Alabama Music Enterprises.) His colleagues were the keyboardist Barry Beckett, the guitarist Jimmy Johnson and Mr. Hood, who played bass. Mr. Hood is the last surviving member of that rhythm section.Mr. Hawkins’s less-is-more approach to drumming at FAME — often little more than a cymbal and a snare — can be heard on Percy Sledge’s gospel-steeped “When a Man Loves a Woman,” a No. 1 pop single in 1966. He was also a driving force behind Aretha Franklin’s imperious “Respect,” a No. 1 pop hit the next year, as well as her Top 10 singles “Chain of Fools” (1967) and “Think” (1968).Mr. Hawkins was a driving force behind some of Aretha Franklin’s biggest hits. Seen here with Ms. Franklin in a New York studio in 1968 are, from left, the producer Arif Mardin, the guitarist Tommy Cogbill, Mr. Hawkins, the bassist Jerry Jemmott, the keyboardist Spooner Oldham, the guitarist Jimmy Johnson and the producer and arranger Tom Dowd.The Estate of David Gahr/Getty ImagesRemarkably, none of the four members of the FAME rhythm section could read music. They extemporized their parts in response to what was happening in the studio.“Nobody really suggested anything to play; we would interpret it,” Mr. Hawkins said in a 2017 interview with Modern Drummer magazine. “Now that I look back at what we did, in addition to being musicians, we were really arrangers as well. It was up to us to come up with the part.”In his 2015 memoir, “The Man From Muscle Shoals: My Journey From Shame to FAME,” Mr. Hall attributed the transformation of the middle section of Wilson Pickett’s “Land of 1000 Dances,” a Top 10 hit recorded at FAME in 1966, to the genius of Mr. Hawkins.“All the musicians stopped playing except Roger Hawkins, who continued to play with every ounce of strength he had in his body,” Mr. Hall recalled. “I poured the echo into the drums and Pickett started screaming, ‘Nah, nah nah nah nah, nah nah nah nah, nah nah nah, nah nah nah, nah nah nah nah.’”From left, Mr. Johnson, Wilson Pickett, Mr. Oldham, Mr. Hawkins and Junior Lowe at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Ala., in 1966.FAME StudiosMr. Hawkins said that a principal influence on his playing was Al Jackson Jr., the drummer with Booker T. & the MGs, the rhythm section at Stax Records. “Through listening to Al Jackson is how I learned to build a drum part in a soul ballad,” he said in a 2019 interview with Alabama magazine.In 1969 Mr. Hawkins and the other members of the FAME rhythm section parted ways with Mr. Hall over a financial dispute. They soon opened their own studio, Muscle Shoals Sound, in a former coffin warehouse in nearby Sheffield.Renaming themselves the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, the four men appeared on many other hits over the next decade, including the Staple Singers’ chart-topping pop-gospel single “I’ll Take You There,” a 1972 recording galvanized by Mr. Hawkins’s skittering Caribbean-style drum figure. They also appeared, along with the gospel quartet the Dixie Hummingbirds, on Paul Simon’s “Loves Me Like a Rock,” a Top 10 single in 1973.Mr. Hawkins and Mr. Hood worked briefly with the British rock band Traffic as well; they are on the band’s 1973 album, “Shoot Out at the Fantasy Factory.”Mr. Hawkins and his colleagues became known as the Swampers after the producer Denny Cordell heard the pianist Leon Russell commend them for their “funky, soulful Southern swamp sound.” The Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd mentioned them, by that name, in their 1974 pop hit “Sweet Home Alabama.”Mr. Hawkins also worked as a producer, often in tandem with Mr. Beckett, on records like “Starting All Over Again,” a Top 20 pop hit for the R&B duo Mel and Tim in 1972. The entire rhythm section produced (with Mr. Seger) and played on Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band’s “Old Time Rock & Roll,” a Top 40 hit perennially cited as among the most played jukebox records of all time.Roger Gail Hawkins was born on Oct. 16, 1945, in Mishawaka, Ind., but was raised in Greenhill, Ala. He was the only child of John Hawkins, who managed a shoe store there, and Merta Rose Haddock Hawkins, who worked in a nearby knitting mill.Roger became enamored of rhythm while attending services at a local Pentecostal church as a youth. His father bought him his first drum kit when he was 13.As an adolescent, he began spending time at FAME, then located above a drugstore in Muscle Shoals, before he joined the Del Rays, a local band, led by Mr. Johnson, that played fraternity parties and other dances. By 1966 he was doing session work at FAME.Early in his career Mr. Hawkins (top right with Mr. Oldham) played in the band Dan Penn and the Pallbearers, along with, from left, Mr. Lowe, Mr. Penn and Donnie Fritts.FAME StudiosHe and the other owners of Muscle Shoals Sound sold the studio in the 1990s. Mr. Hawkins stayed on as the studio’s manager under its new owners.Mr. Hawkins was inducted into the Alabama Music Hall of Fame in 1995, along with the other members of the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section. Thirteen years later they were enshrined in the Musicians Hall of Fame in Nashville.He is survived by his wife of 19 years, Brenda Gay Hawkins; a son, Dale; and two grandchildren.Mr. Hawkins’s approach to session work often focused on those moments in a recording when he remained silent, waiting for just the right time and place to strike the next note.“Every musician strives to be the best they can,” he told Modern Drummer. “Not every musician gets the chances I had. Some new studio players have an attitude of ‘Man, I’ve got to play something great here — got to play the fast stuff to be hired again.’“That’s not the way to go,” he continued. “I’ve always said this: I was always a better listener than I was a drummer. I would advise any drummer to become a listener.” More

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      Bob Koester, Revered Figure in Jazz and Blues, Dies at 88

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      Mr. Koester’s Delmark Records and his Chicago record store were vital in preserving and promoting music the big labels tended to overlook.Bob Koester, who founded the influential Chicago blues and jazz label Delmark Records and was also the proprietor of an equally influential record store where players and fans mingled as they sought out new and vintage sounds, died on Wednesday at a care center in Evanston, Ill., near his home in Chicago. He was 88.His wife, Sue Koester, said the cause was complications of a stroke.Mr. Koester was a pivotal figure in Chicago and beyond, releasing early efforts by Sun Ra, Anthony Braxton, Jimmy Dawkins, Magic Sam and numerous other jazz and blues musicians. He captured the sound of Chicago’s vibrant blues scene of the 1960s on records like “Hoodoo Man Blues,” a much admired album by the singer and harmonica player Junior Wells, featuring the guitarist Buddy Guy, that was recorded in 1965.Delmark captured the sound of Chicago’s vibrant blues scene in records like Junior Wells’s “Hoodoo Man Blues.” It also documented early examples of the avant-garde jazz being promulgated in Chicago by musicians like Anthony Braxton.“Bob told us, ‘Play me a record just like you played last night in the club,’” Mr. Guy recalled in a 2009 interview with The New York Times, and somehow he caught the electric feel of a live performance. In 2008 the record was named to the Grammy Hall of Fame.About the same time, Delmark was recording early examples of the avant-garde jazz being promulgated by the pianist Muhal Richard Abrams and other members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, an organization formed in Chicago in 1965. The company’s recordings were not, generally, the kind that generated a lot of sales.“If he felt something was significant, he wasn’t going to think about whether it would sell,” Ms. Koester said by phone. “He wanted people to hear it and experience the significance.”As Howard Mandel, the jazz critic and author, put it in a phone interview: “He followed his own star. He was not at all interested in trends.”For decades Mr. Koester’s record store, the Jazz Record Mart, provided enough financial support to allow Delmark to make records that didn’t sell a lot of copies. The store was more than an outlet for Delmark’s artists; it was packed with all sorts of records, many of them from collections Mr. Koester bought or traded for.“The place was just an amazing crossroads of people,” said Mr. Mandel, who worked there for a time in the early 1970s. Music lovers would come looking for obscure records; tourists would come because of the store’s reputation; musicians would come to swap stories and ideas.Mr. Koester in an undated photo. His store was packed with all sorts of records, many of them from collections he bought or traded for.Chicago Sun-Times“Shakey Walter Horton and Ransom Knowling would hang out there, and Sunnyland Slim and Homesick James were always dropping by,” the harmonica player and bandleader Charlie Musselwhite, who was a clerk at the store in the mid-1960s, told The Times in 2009, rattling off the names of some fellow blues musicians. “You never knew what fascinating characters would wander in, so I always felt like I was in the eye of the storm there.”Mr. Mandel said part of the fun was tapping into Mr. Koester’s deep reservoir of arcane musical knowledge.“You’d get into a conversation with him,” he said, “and in 10 minutes he was talking about some obscure wormhole of a serial number on a pressing.”Ms. Koester said the store held a special place in her husband’s heart — so much so that when he finally closed it in 2016, citing rising rent, he opened another, Bob’s Blues and Jazz Mart, almost immediately.“He loved going into the studio in the days when he was recording Junior Wells and Jimmy Dawkins,” she said, “but retail was in his blood.”He especially loved talking to customers.“Often they came into the store looking for one thing,” she said, “and he pointed them in another direction.”Robert Gregg Koester was born on Oct. 30, 1932, in Wichita, Kan. His father, Edward, was a petroleum geologist, and his mother, Mary (Frank) Koester, was a homemaker.He grew up in Wichita. A 78 r.p.m. record by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in his grandfather’s collection intrigued him when he was young, he said in an oral history recorded in 2017 by the National Association of Music Merchants. But, he told Richard Marcus in a 2008 interview for blogcritics.com, further musical exploration wasn’t easy.“I never liked country music, and growing up in Wichita, Kansas, there wasn’t much else,” he said. “There was a mystery to the names of those old blues guys — Speckled Red, Pinetop Perkins — that made it sound really appealing. Probably something to do with a repressed Catholic upbringing.”College at Saint Louis University, where he enrolled to study cinematography, broadened his musical opportunities.“My parents didn’t want me going to school in one of the big cities like New York or Chicago because they didn’t want me to be distracted from my studies by music,” he said. “Unfortunately for them, there were Black jazz clubs all around the university.”Music lovers would come to the Jazz Record Mart looking for obscure records; tourists would come because of the store’s reputation; musicians would come to swap stories and ideas.Sally Ryan for The New York TimesHe also joined the St. Louis Jazz Club, a jazz appreciation group. And he started accumulating and trading records, especially traditional jazz 78s, out of his dorm room. The rapidly growing record business crowded out his studies.“I went to three years at Saint Louie U,” he said in the oral history. “They told me not to come back for a fourth year.”His dorm-room business turned into a store, where he sold both new and used records.“I’d make regular runs, hitting all the secondhand stores, Father Dempsey’s Charities, places like that, buying used records,” he told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1993 for an article marking the 40th anniversary of the founding of his record label. “And I’d order records through the mail. Then I’d sell records at the Jazz Club meetings. That was the beginning of my retail business.”He had started recording musicians as well. He originally called his label Delmar, after a St. Louis boulevard, but once he relocated to Chicago in the late 1950s he added the K.He acquired a Chicago record shop from a trumpeter named Seymour Schwartz in 1959 and soon turned it into the Jazz Record Mart. His label not only recorded the players of the day but also reissued older recordings.“He loved obscure record labels from the ‘30s and ‘40s, and he acquired several of them,” Mr. Mandel said. “He reissued a lot of stuff from fairly obscure artists who had recorded independently. He salvaged their best work.”Mr. Koester was white; most of the artists he dealt with were Black.“He was totally into Black music,” Mr. Mandel said. “Not only Black music, but he definitely gave Black music its due in a way that other labels were not.”That made Mr. Koester stand out in Chicago when he went out on the town sampling talent.“When a white guy showed up in a Black bar, it was assumed he was either a cop, a bill collector or looking for sex,” Mr. Koester told blogcritic.com. “When they found out you were there to listen to the music and for no other reason, you were a friend. The worst times I had were from white cops who would try and throw me out of the bars. They probably thought I was there dealing drugs or something.”It was the atmosphere of those nightclubs that he tried to capture in his recording studio.“I don’t believe in production,” he said. “I’m not about to bring in a bunch of stuff that you can’t hear a guy doing when he’s up onstage.”In addition to his wife, whom he met when she worked across the street from his store and whom he married in 1967, Mr. Koester is survived by a son, Robert Jr.; a daughter, Kate Koester; and two grandchildren.Ms. Koester said their son will continue to operate Bob’s Blues and Jazz Mart. Mr. Koester sold Delmark in 2018.Mr. Koester’s record company played an important role in documenting two musical genres, but his wife said that beyond playing a little piano, he was not musically trained himself.“He would say his music was listening,” she said. More

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      Can’s Live Shows Will Be Heard at Last, Thanks to a Bootlegger in Big Pants

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      A series of concert albums by the influential German band were made possible by Andrew Hall, a fan who followed the group around in the 1970s with a Sony cassette recorder hidden in his trousers.In February 1972, following the surprise success of the single “Spoon,” the experimental rock group Can staged a massive free concert in its Cologne, West Germany, hometown. To better entertain the crowd, it punctuated the music with a slapdash circus, including a juggler, a singing saw player and a team of acrobats.The band planned to document the event with a live recording, as well as a concert film directed by Peter Przygodda, who became Wim Wenders’s editor. The film footage turned out fine — shot in part by the renowned cinematographer Robby Müller — but there was a glitch with the audio. “Something went wrong and the equipment didn’t record,” Irmin Schmidt, one of the group’s founders, recalled ruefully in a phone interview last month. Schmidt’s keyboards and Michael Karoli’s guitar were inaudible. The film was rescued with overdubs, but the live album was scuttled.The incident was one of several mishaps that prevented Can from issuing a proper concert album during its 1968 to 1978 existence or since, despite numerous releases on its own Spoon label mining its voluminous archives. (A few odds-and-ends live recordings have arrived over the years.) But later this month, Mute Records will release “Live in Stuttgart 1975,” the first in a series of restored and remastered live albums made possible by Andrew Hall, a British fan who beginning in 1973 followed the group around with a Sony cassette recorder hidden in his pants.“We didn’t talk to each other onstage at all,” Schmidt said. “Everything we had to say to each other, we did with our instruments.”Sandra PodmoreHall’s job as a developmental chemist allowed him to travel, and he organized his schedule to coincide with Can gigs in the United Kingdom and northern Europe. “I think the number of live shows I attended was 44,” Hall said in an email. “I recorded every one.”Hall, who had a 28-inch waist size, wore 36-inch trousers to fit the recorder and threaded microphones down each of his sleeves. He donned a heavy overcoat to camouflage the illicit ensemble. “If the temperature was turned up,” he writes in the album’s liner notes, “I just about melted.”Whenever Hall couldn’t make a gig, he’d ask other fans to send their own cassettes. His bootleg archive ultimately reached several hundred recordings, “most of them in quite a bad technical state,” said Schmidt. “I refused all the time to go through it, but Hildegard is very insistent, and finally she convinced me,” he added, referring to his wife, who has managed the band’s affairs since 1971.The album is the first recording issued under the Can banner since the deaths of the bassist Holger Czukay and the drummer Jaki Liebezeit in 2017. (Karoli died in 2001; the band’s primary vocalist, Damo Suzuki, whom Czukay and Liebezeit recruited when they heard him busking in Munich, remains a globe-trotting troubadour.) For most of the last 40 years, Schmidt, 83, has lived in the south of France with Hildegard.Though they recorded their first several albums in a 14th-century castle, Can uniquely anticipated 21st-century music making. Blending the heady experimentation of Schmidt and Czukay, both former students of Karlheinz Stockhausen — including the use of noise, sampling and minimalist repetition — with the body-moving hypnotic groove generated by the jazz-trained Liebezeit’s drums, Can created a free-flowing improvisatory psychedelia that put the “trance” in “transcendent.”The group inspired multiple generations of post-punk and alternative bands and electronic musicians, and found its way to hip-hop (see Kanye West’s “Drunk and Hot Girls,” among other songs). It also made the opening boast of LCD Soundsystem’s debut single “Losing My Edge,” where James Murphy announced, “I was there in 1968/I was there at the first Can show in Cologne.”In everything Can, Schmidt said, spontaneity was crucial. “When we went onstage, we didn’t even know beforehand what we would play. We just reacted to the atmosphere, to the acoustics, to the public, to the whole environment spontaneously, and started playing something, which we had never played before,” he said. “We didn’t talk to each other onstage at all. Everything we had to say to each other, we did with our instruments.”Despite taping its marathon daily studio sessions, the group neglected to make any board recordings from their live concerts. “We should have,” Schmidt lamented, “but we didn’t and that’s a pity.”The Stuttgart gig derives from a tour around the release of “Landed,” Can’s sixth studio LP and its second without a vocalist, Suzuki having departed in 1973. The four musicians connect in a freewheeling pyroclastic flow not dissimilar from the futuristic fusion of Miles Davis’s electric bands of that period. Karoli’s guitar weaves between inner and outer space until several of the untitled, totally instrumental pieces culminate in freaked-out sonic squalls, outbursts the band called “Godzillas.”The Mute Records founder Daniel Miller saw the band in London on that same tour. “I just wanted it to go on forever,” he said. “I couldn’t believe how they worked together as a band, how they fed off each other in the improvisational sense. It was beyond anything I’d seen before.”From left: Czukay, Liebezeit, Karoli and Schmidt. “There were of course also concerts which were horrible, really bad, because we played without any net,” Schmidt said.Via SpoonSchmidt feels that the Stuttgart gig is a good example of Can’s stage interplay. On the second track, Czukay begins the bass line from “Bel Air” but the melody ultimately drifts away when nobody joins in. “If we played something which reminded or was near to a song, somebody just came up with it all of a sudden,” Schmidt said. “It was sometimes sort of like a game. You threw something towards the other, and he picked it up, or he didn’t use it and threw it to somebody else. When it worked it was very beautiful and inspiring, even very amusing, using parts of what you have already done, but giving it a totally new direction.”The band’s concerts were usually three hours long, comprising two 90-minute sets. For the live series, Schmidt plans to largely avoid single songs from different nights in favor of entire gigs, “which shows how we structured the set, how the flow was going, the feeling of a real concert,” he said.Can’s improvisatory ethic did not always guarantee consistent results. “You can’t play like this onstage, giving yourself totally up to the atmosphere and to the moment spontaneously, without sometimes risking failure,” Schmidt explained. “There were of course also concerts which were horrible, really bad, because we played without any net.”But even in the worst-case scenarios, there was still potential for magic. “Quite often, when the first set went terribly, people didn’t leave and the second set became really wonderful,” he said. “So the public sort of took part in our efforts to create. It was really like, if it didn’t work, they suffered like us, with us, and if it worked they enjoyed it like us.”The next release will be from the Brighton, England, stop on the same 1975 tour, Schmidt said, but he hopes to feature earlier performances, including potentially a recently discovered 1970 German TV performance.“When I more or less founded this group, I wanted to bring together totally different musical experiences and styles,” Schmidt said. “I wanted musicians who were professionally at home in different contemporary musics like jazz, rock, electronics, and neo-classical music. To bring it together was not easy and created a lot of tension, but that made the music so interesting because when it succeeded, the tension made sense, and created beauty.” More

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      Rough Trade Record Store Has an Unlikely New Home: 30 Rock

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      The Brooklyn shop is downsizing and moving across the river, bringing 10,000 vinyl albums and its live events to Rockefeller Center in Midtown.When the Rough Trade record store housed in a 10,000 square foot warehouse in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, announced it was closing and relocating in January, few could have imagined its new home would be adjacent to the gleaming neon lights of NBC Studios and the towering marquee of Radio City Music Hall.But starting June 1, commuters (should they return) and tourists exiting the subway at 49th Street and Sixth Avenue in Manhattan will find stacks of vinyl behind the window of the latest Rough Trade record shop, at 30 Rockefeller Plaza.“Midtown certainly was not in the script,” said Stephen Godfroy, one of Rough Trade’s owners, in a video interview from his home in Oxford, England, last week. “That’s what makes it exciting for us — to champion emerging artists in a place where people wouldn’t expect it.”Last Tuesday, tubs of Sheetrock, power tools and a small dumpster still filled the 2,100-square-foot space — a former shoe store just under a quarter of the size of Rough Trade’s old Williamsburg location — that will soon house some 10,000 new vinyl records. The windows facing out onto Avenue of the Americas were covered in messaging from its new landlords, the real estate giant Tishman Speyer, advertising an app called Zo, which a representative from the company described as its “tenant amenities platform.”Rockefeller Center may seem a curious spot for Rough Trade, a shop born of mid-1970s London counterculture that spun out into a record label of the same name in 1978. But the Rough Trade stores of 2021 are by now a long way removed from their scrappy beginnings, having split from the label in 1982.“Not being obvious bedfellows, we had to look at the details,” said Godfroy, who has been with Rough Trade since 2003. That included the specifics of the location, sandwiched right at street level between the subway station and “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.”The original Rough Trade shop in London.Rough TradeAs with their other four shops, all in the United Kingdom, the new Rough Trade will continue to host live events, but its partner will no longer be the concert promoter the Bowery Presents. Instead, Rough Trade will be part of the programming at Rockefeller Center, and its Midtown gigs will be held on the building’s 65th floor in the ritzy Rainbow Room, and at surrounding spaces such as the plaza and, in summertime, the ice skating rink.Godfroy said Rough Trade had been considering a move across the East River since the summer of 2019, to better access the ever-growing number of people who want to buy new releases and reissued favorites on wax. Weekday foot traffic was never great in Williamsburg. (Not that Midtown is doing much better at the moment.) And though Rough Trade had maintained its sales numbers online through 2020, the move was “really precipitated by the pandemic,” Godfroy said, which put the necessity of keeping busy every day “into sharp relief.”While Midtown is mostly synonymous with office towers and Broadway theaters, it also has a rich and varied history of record stores — like the former album- and sheet-music emporium Colony Records in the Brill Building, the eclectic D.J. hub Rock and Soul near Penn Station and chains such as Disc-O-Mat. The hostile nature of Manhattan real estate has contributed to many shuttering this past decade.Tishman Speyer and Rough Trade declined to comment on the specifics of Rough Trade’s lease. (Its Brooklyn spot, which it occupied for seven years, is currently available to rent for about $50,000 a month.) But Ben Van Leeuwen, an owner of the store’s soon-to-be neighbor at 30 Rock, Van Leeuwen Ice Cream, said his business received a generous deal even before the pandemic, allowing it to open there in 2019 at a lower risk.“Tishman makes a lot of their money off the office space above,” said Van Leeuwen, which creates flexibility for the ground-level stores. “I imagine there are a lot of bigger brands that would have taken that space in a heartbeat and paid a lot more than we’re paying,” he said, but added that it was his understanding that the real estate company wanted to have storefronts that were “local and more artisanal.”Rough Trade’s new neighbors on Sixth Avenue will include Radio City Music Hall and a Van Leeuwen ice cream shop.Amr Alfiky/The New York TimesGodfroy said the store’s significant downsize in square footage, coupled with its status as a tourist destination, will mean that “the cost-benefit analysis is pretty much the same.” To bolster its smaller size, the shop will use mechanical Vestaboard displays to share real-time gig ticket info, sales charts and music news — “They make that chk-chk-chk sound that you get sometimes in airports and train stations,” Godfroy said — and it will also hold records at a new online fulfillment center in Greenpoint.30 Rock was first called the RCA Building when it opened in 1933, and some lost New York City music lore lingers in the neighborhood. In the 1970s, the engineer Don Hünerberg rented a studio above Radio City — previously used by the NBC Symphony Orchestra — and the first Blondie and Ramones albums were tracked there. The avant-garde fixtures John Zorn and Glenn Branca also worked there, as did Sonic Youth for its 1982 debut EP. “The Rockettes would rehearse down the hall which always gave the place a certain ‘kick,’” Thurston Moore, a singer and guitarist for Sonic Youth, recalled in an email.More recently, the arts space National Sawdust presented an “immersive, site-specific choral and movement piece” called “The Gauntlet” at Rockefeller Center in 2019. The internet station NTS Radio hosted live broadcasts there that year; it also programs, with complete creative control, the background music played inside the buildings.Back in Brooklyn, the borough’s biggest record store is now Academy Records, which is currently located in Greenpoint. Its owner, Mike Davis, said that Rough Trade’s departure from the neighborhood had so far not impacted his sales numbers. “We’re both ostensibly record stores, but we’re sort of in a different business,” he said, noting Rough Trade’s emphasis on new releases and his own store’s focus on used vinyl. “They’re kind of catering to a slightly different market.”Josh Madell, a former co-owner of the beloved, now-closed East Village shop Other Music and the current head of artist and label strategy at Secretly Distribution, proposed that this could be “a branding move” for Rough Trade, who might be looking “to drive music fans to their web store as much as to their new brick and mortar shop.” (That’s not dissimilar to what happened when Sub Pop opened its Sea-Tac Airport store in 2014, according to the retail director there.)Madell sees Rough Trade’s move as a positive one for the independent music industry, even as he finds it hard to imagine local record heads traveling to 30 Rock to flip through the stacks. “I don’t think that’s who they’re trying to attract,” Madell said, noting that he had only been to Rockefeller Center in the past decade to visit the Lego store with his daughter. “They’re reaching a different audience.”“Vinyl’s not really an underground medium anymore,” he added. 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