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

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

    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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    Henry Goldrich, Gear Guru to Rock Stars, Is Dead at 88

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyHenry Goldrich, Gear Guru to Rock Stars, Is Dead at 88The owner of Manny’s Music in Manhattan, he brought wah-wah to Hendrix and Clapton and connected musicians with equipment that helped define their styles.Henry Goldrich in an undated photo in front of his store, Manny’s Music, which until it closed in 2009 was the largest and best-known of the cluster of music shops on West 48th Street in Manhattan.Credit…via Ian GoldrichMarch 4, 2021, 6:29 p.m. ETWhen asked about his musical ability, Henry Goldrich would often demur, “I play cash register.”His stage was Manny’s Music in Manhattan, where Mr. Goldrich, the longtime owner, supplied equipment to a generation of rock stars. But even though he sold instead of strummed, Mr. Goldrich secured an important role in rock by connecting famous musicians with cutting-edge equipment.“To these guys, Henry was the superstar,” his son Judd said. “He was the first guy to get gear they had never seen before.”Mr. Goldrich died on Feb. 16 at his home in Boca Raton, Fla. He was 88.His death was confirmed by his other son, Ian, who said he had been in frail but stable health.Manny’s, which closed in 2009 after 74 years in business, was long the largest and best-known of the cluster of music shops on the West 48th Street block known as Music Row.It was opened in 1935 by Mr. Goldrich’s father, Manny, and it was a second home for Henry since his infancy, when the shop’s clientele of swing stars doted on him. Ella Fitzgerald would babysit for him in the shop when his parents went out for lunch, Ian Goldrich said.By 1968, when his father died at 62, Henry Goldrich had largely taken over operations and had turned the shop into an equipment mecca and hangout for world-renowned artists.He did this by expanding its inventory of the latest gear and by solidifying connections with suppliers that helped him consistently stock high-level instruments and new products.Mr. Goldrich sold guitars to Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend and many others. He was not happy about Mr. Townshend’s penchant for smashing them.Credit…Chester Higgins Jr./The New York TimesAt a time before rock stars were lavished with the latest equipment straight from the manufacturers, Manny’s was favored by top musicians searching for new gear and testing out new equipment.These included two guitar gods of the 1960s, Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton — to whom, Ian Goldrich said, his father recommended the wah-wah pedal, an electronic device that immediately became a staple of both musicians’ approaches. He added that Hendrix would buy scores of guitars on credit and have Mr. Goldrich fine-tune them to the guitarist’s demanding preferences.Many rock and pop classics were either played or written on instruments sold by Mr. Goldrich.John Sebastian, founder of the Lovin’ Spoonful, recalled in an interview how Mr. Goldrich in the mid-1960s helped him select the Gibson J-45 he used on early Spoonful recordings like “Do You Believe in Magic?”Mr. Goldrich similarly matched James Taylor with a quality Martin acoustic guitar early in his career, his son Ian said. And Sting used the Fender Stratocaster Mr. Goldrich sold him to compose “Message in a Bottle” and many other hits for the Police before donating it to the Smithsonian Institution.The photos on the Manny’s Wall of Fame constituted a Who’s Who of popular music. Credit…Chester Higgins Jr./The New York TimesIn 1970, he sold the Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour the 1969 black Stratocaster he played on many of the band’s seminal recordings. It sold at auction in 2019 for a record $3,975,000.Pete Townshend of the Who would order expensive electric guitars by the dozens from Mr. Goldrich, who was not happy when he heard about the guitarist’s penchant for destroying his instrument onstage for theatrical effect.“It was good business,” Ian Goldrich said, “but my father was annoyed that Pete was breaking all the guitars he was selling him.”Unlike many of his flamboyant rock-star customers, Mr. Goodrich always dressed conventionally in a sport coat and kept a blunt demeanor that put his customers at ease.“He had a gruff personality; he treated them all the same,” Ian Goldrich said. “He’d tell Bob Dylan, ‘Sit in the back and I’ll be with you in a minute.’”There was the day in 1985 — it was Black Friday, and the store was packed — that Mick Jagger and David Bowie stopped by together, creating a commotion that halted sales. An annoyed Mr. Goldrich quickly sold them their items and rushed them out.“My father was like, ‘What are you guys doing here today?’” Ian recalled. “He didn’t throw them out, but he was not happy.”When the band Guns N’ Roses asked to shoot part of the video for their 1989 hit “Paradise City” in the store, Ian Goldrich recalled, his father agreed only reluctantly, saying, “OK, but we’re not shutting down for them.”Ever opinionated, Mr. Goldrich told Harry Chapin in 1972 that his new song “Taxi,” at nearly seven minutes, was too lengthy to be a hit. (It reached the Top 40 and is now considered a classic.) And he told Paul Simon, who as a boy had bought his first guitar at Manny’s, that he thought Simon and Garfunkel was a “lousy name” for a group.But he also advised new stars in a fatherly way not to squander their newfound wealth.“He’d take them aside and say, ‘You’re making money now — how are you going to take care of it?’” Ian Goldrich said.From left, the singer Richie Havens, the singer and radio host Oscar Brand and Mr. Goldrich at a celebration of Manny’s Music’s 50th anniversary at the Rainbow Grill in 1985.Credit…Marilyn K. Yee/The New York TimesHenry Jerome Goldrich was born on May 15, 1932, to Manny and Julia Goldrich, and grew up in Brooklyn and in Hewlett on Long Island. After graduating from Adelphi College, he served in the Army in Korea in the mid-1950s and then went to work full time at Manny’s.His father opened the store on West 48th Street, a location he chose because it was close to the Broadway theaters and the 52nd Street jazz clubs, as well as numerous recording studios and the Brill Building, a hub for music publishers. In 1999, Mr. Goldrich sold Manny’s to Sam Ash Music, a rival store, which largely retained the staff until Manny’s closed in 2009.In addition to his sons, Mr. Goldrich is survived by his wife, Judi; his daughter, Holly Goldrich; seven grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.Mr. Goldrich often used his celebrity clientele to market the store. “He recognized value of these people being in the store and it made the business, certainly,” his son Judd said.When a young Eric Clapton, then with the group Cream, was stuck in New York without the money to fly home to England, he offered his amplifiers to Mr. Goldrich to raise funds.“He said, ‘I’ll buy them from you as long as you stencil them with the Cream logo,” Ian said.Then there was the store’s Wall of Fame, thousands of autographed publicity photos of famous customers that constituted a Who’s Who of popular music. Mr. Goldrich helped cultivate the photos, many of which were inscribed to him, and often kept his staff from stacking merchandise in front of them.Mr. Taylor, in a video interview, described being mesmerized by the photos as a teenager and being proud when his own was added. “It was sort of an inside thing, not as celebrated as a Grammy or a gold record or a position on the charts,” he said. “But definitely you had arrived if you were included on that wall.”Mr. Goldrich became close friends with many musicians, including the Who’s bassist, John Entwistle, who attended Judd’s bar mitzvah in New Jersey and hosted the Goldrich family at his Gothic mansion in England. Ian remembered the band’s drummer, Keith Moon, sitting on his father’s lap while drinking cognac at a screening of the film “Tommy.”In a video interview, Mr. Goldrich described selling the violinist Itzhak Perlman an electric violin. When Mr. Perlman tried bargaining, Mr. Goldrich parried by asking if he ever reduced his performance fee.“He said, ‘It’s different, I’m a talent,’” Mr. Goldrich recalled. “I said, ‘I’m a talent in my own way, too.’”That talent was palpable to Mr. Sebastian when he asked Mr. Goldrich to allow him to test out his stock of Gibson acoustic guitars in a merchandise room.“Henry’s famously prickly demeanor receded slightly,” Mr. Sebastian recalled, and he agreed to open early the next morning to allow him in.“He knew exactly what I wanted,” he said. “And I’ll be damned if I didn’t catch Henry smiling as he made out the bill.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More