Joseph Jarman

Record man Koester’s blues and jazz legacy

Chicagoan Bob Koester, proprietor of the Jazz Record Mart and Delmark Records for nearly 70 years, is a model of music activism and entrepreneurship from an era rapidly receding and unlikely in current business circumstances. Neil Genzlinger did a nice formal New York Times obit, and I’ve written a remembrance for the Chicago Reader.

Bob Koester at the Jazz Record Mart, photo by Michael Jackson

Although some independent record stores dealing new and used physical recordings remain in Chicago, I know of none co-joined to an active independent record company, and at the hub of a metropolis-wide community (or interlocking communities) of musicians, fans, writers, photographers, recording engineers and casual listeners. To do that all that now requires a media savvy and bankroll that dwarfs what was possible pre-Internet anad prior to big media industry consolidations.

I continue to believe a personal vision with lots of energy behind it can break through at least to the point of surviving, even if it’s concerned with niche or off-brand content. That is to say more clearly: If you want to get some art out, yours or someone else’s, being smart and determined you’ll find a way to make a mark. A scratch or a dent maybe more than a splash, but that’s something. And who knows where it can lead. When Bob Koester started even his new record store, when he recorded or obtained and issued what have become enduring classic albums by Speckled Red and Big Joe Williams, Junior Wells, Luther Allison and Magic Sam, the first Sun Ra, Roscoe Mitchell and the other AACM originals (Jarman, Muhal, Kalaparusha, Braxton) as well as late career works by artists of earlier decades (Edith Wilson, Roosevelt Sykes, Art Hodes, Sleepy John Estes, Franz Jackson, too many to mention) — when he co-founded the Jazz Institute of Chicago (he insisted blues be part of its portfolio, and knew a lot of musicians to contact for performances) — could he have foreseen what would come of his efforts?

Does anyone?

Legacies of Music Makers

The deaths of multi-instrumentalist Joseph Jarman, best known as the face-painted shaman of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Alvin Fielder,

re-conceptualizing drummer, remind us that artists’ contributions to music extend beyond recordings and awards. Read my essay at NPR Music, commissioned by Nate Chinen of WBGO, on the enduring legacies of Jarman and Fielder, both founding members of the still thriving Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) NY and Chicago).

Fred Anderson, Chicago jazz hero, appreciated

As a teenager in pursuit of the avant garde, I took tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson, who died June 24 at age 81, as a hero upon first hearing himÂ in 1966. It wasÂ at a Unitarian Church-run coffee house in downtown Evanston near Northwestern U., and attention clearly had to be paid toÂ the long, fierce, unreeling, knotty improvisations Anderson delivered in an ever-more hunkered-down posture as the evening went on.

There was an unremitting sense of urgency, sincerity and humility to what he was saying on his horn, spelled by startling outbursts from his pained-looking trumpeter, Billy Brimfield, and support from some rhythmically free-flowing bass and drummer (I forget who). Â There was nothing showy about Fred, though he was a large man who wore a skullcap. He was old to me then — 36 or 37. I bought Song For, Joseph Jarman’s album brilliantly employing Anderson’s standing band as soon as Delmark released it that year, too. I heard him many times in the 15 years that followed, at various concerts produced by the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) of which he was a co-founder along with another of my musical heroes, Muhal Richard Abrams. Fred was never less than totally involved in what he was doing, which was forcing air through a bent tube to shake the earth we walked on and the culture we breathed. (Photo left by Jim Newberry, thanks to Thrill Jockey records.)

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