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Bob Koester in the stacks at the Jazz Record Mart in 2009 Michael Jackson
Bob Koester, who died May 12 at age 88, knew what he liked and what you should like too. For nearly 70 years, he owned Chicago s Jazz Record Mart (and the Delmark label), and it was completely in character for him to snatch an album from the hands of an earnest young shopper.
In 1968, that shopper was me I d picked up a copy of Muhal Richard Abrams s debut LP,
Levels and Degrees of Light, whose surreal cover painting and saturated colors promised something exotic and strange made right here. I was more than eager to hear it, but Koester still black-haired, wearing glasses, not graceful, not yet 40 had other ideas. You can t understand
Donald Teplyske | May 1, 2021
Vinyl Ventures: My Fifty Years at Rounder Records
by Bill Nowlin Equinoxpub.com 2020
Imagine starting a record company in 2021with next to no business experience nor a background, beyond listening, in music. Oh, and launch that label with an album from an obscure North Carolinian banjo player. A daunting, even foolish proposition?
I m not sure it was different in 197O when three just-out-of-college friends, leftovers from the first generation of hippies and counter-culture types, decided to launch Rounder Records, a label that became synonymous with traditional and contemporary roots music over the next half-century. Vinyl Ventures: My Fifty Years at Rounder Records isn t likely to appeal to the masses. While he has an engaging, personable, and readable writing style, Bill Nowlin one of those three original Rounder founders tends to occasionally get bogged down in the minutiae of ledger sheets (which, for this reader, undoubtedly provi