{"id":214,"date":"2009-06-28T10:09:24","date_gmt":"2009-06-28T14:09:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/jazzbeyondjazz\/wp\/2009\/06\/chicagos_quirky_hero_of_blues\/"},"modified":"2011-04-28T16:34:03","modified_gmt":"2011-04-28T20:34:03","slug":"chicagos_quirky_hero_of_blues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/jazzbeyondjazz\/2009\/06\/chicagos_quirky_hero_of_blues.html","title":{"rendered":"Chicago’s quirky hero of blues and jazz in NYT"},"content":{"rendered":"
Bob Koester, owner-operator of Delmark Records<\/a> and the Jazz Record Mart<\/a>, is celebrated in the New York Times’\u00c2\u00a0Arts & Leisure<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0section today. He’s documented and marketed South and West Side soul, AACM<\/a> innovation, trad jazz and the Mississippi Delta blues revival. I’m among the many music fans who grew up in his sway — and include my 12-best list of albums Koester brought to life.<\/span><\/div>\n

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\nOn my 17th birthday I wandered into the JRM, a small storefront on a dingy commercial corner of Near North Chicago, intending to take advantage of a post-Christmas inventory sale. It was upstairs of a subway stop, next to a steam-table restaurant for pensioners from a SRO hotel that was one-step from Skid Row, and was filled with bins of odd LPs, decorated with newspaper clippings — reviews and obits — taped to its walls. I felt like Aladdin looking into the cave of treasures.<\/p>\n

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It struck me as fascinating that a gruff black man missing several teeth and with a Southern accent so thick I couldn’t make out a word sat on a stool by the door (this was guitarist-singer Big Joe Williams, who at the time was sleeping in the store’s basement, though I didn’t know that and hadn’t heard a measure of his music yet). I thought it odd that piles of 78s priced at a dime or a quarter took up center tables.\u00c2\u00a0But music across genre was pouring from the store’s turntable and there was Koester — a voluble nut who would start ranting about some platter I’d pulled from the “used” section and end 20 minutes later having detailed its obscure provenance and arcane history as if regaling me with information about the Hope Diamond.<\/div>\n
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He told me I couldn’t possibly understand pianist-composer-clarinetist Muhal Richard Abrams’ Levels and Degrees of Ligh<\/span>t if I didn’t prepare by listening to Sleepy John Estes’ “Rats in My Kitchen,” which I believed at the time was precisely the folk music I was trying to escape via dramatic contemporary alternatives. Koester’s hipster-beatnik clerks — especially the red-bearded and pony-tailed Man in Black — weren’t as bluntly pedantic when they dropped hints as to what I should hear, but they had a storehouse of information and taste that has guided me to this very day.<\/div>\n
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I spent a bulk of my free time over the next five years hanging out at the JRM, reading liner notes, listening to music for free, buying what I could afford, awed when Junior Wells, Jimmy Dawkins (with hungry-looking German Shepherds), Otis Rush, Joseph Jarman of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Joe Segal of the Modern Jazz Showcase and diverse visiting musicians would drop in to shop (or sometimes ask for advances, royalties, copies of their Delmark albums to hawk on the road). Attending to the cross-section of Chicagoans who came in to buy their sounds, I learned a lot about the breadth of tastes and the complex continuums of American music. I worked as a clerk at the JRM the year after I got out of college ($60 a week), sweeping the floor and selling records. I loved the place, came to embrace Speckled Red’s boogie-woogie piano as much as the early efforts of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, and have never abandoned my wonder at the universe Koester convened, created and has sustained.<\/div>\n
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I was lucky to spend evenings with Koester in Chicago blues clubs, and to attend Delmark recording sessions. We’re all lucky to have the music he’s issued. Here are my picks of essential Delmark recordings — highly subjective choices and weighted towards the early catalog. Hear them and judge their enduring qualities for yourself.\u00c2\u00a0<\/div>\n
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