A FIRESIDE CHAT WITH BOB KOESTER, FOUNDER OF DELMARK RECORDS


When I think of the AACM, the label that I associate withthe monumental artist network is Delmark. I have heard first hand practically the entire Delmark catalogue and it has some of the most innovative recordings that your hard earned dollars canbuy. There is very little of the catalogue that I wouldn’t recommend, but that is because the label’s founder, Bob Koester, is about as dedicated to the music as the musicians he records. That’s nothing new for the Roadshow Top Ten Indie Labels. The following is yet another Fireside Chat with a creator, unedited and in his own words.


FRED JUNG: Let’s start from the beginning.

BOB KOESTER: The beat, the balls, and the soul. Probably in that order. I’ve given it a little thought and I grew up when Perry Como was having a wave of popularity and I think that would drive anybody. One thing I do remember is that in sixth grade I got polio and I spent four of five months in a polio ward. You listen to the radio because that was the only form of entertainment that you could have. The top ten fetish was established in popular music and you heard the same damn stuff all the time. There were a few shows that varied. But I do remember hearing the Eddie Condon program. Eddie Condon Jam Session, which was a weekly show and that turned me on to Fats Waller and Count Basie. I don’t know if it was before then or after that, but I did see Basie live around ’46 I suppose. That about did it for me (laughing).


FJ: In your formidable years as a college student, you ran a publication called the Jazz Report.

BOB KOESTER: Yeah, that was trying to promote my record store, which was a pathetic little attempt. The stockroom I am in now is about twice the size of that store and this is a fairly small stockroom. In high school, I had a little racket going with the old 78s. Glenn Miller records were not very rare. He was like Elvis. He sold a lot and RCA probably misses Miller’s lousy personality, but were not very interested with making much of it available. They had a couple of 78 albums and very few singles. But he had done a lot of recording and people wanted everything. Well, I was always picking up Millers. I didn’t mind. They didn’t swing that much, not like Basie. But I sold the duplicates and that was my little sideline. I quickly ran out of people in Wichita, where I lived at the time who wanted anything. So I ran an ad in a Canadian magazine and sold enough to make it worthwhile. I think that kind of opened my nose to the financial side of scrambling for old 78s at second hand stores. Well, I continued that. My first year in college, I met a guy who knew his way around St. Louis. He worked for a record distributor. He knew the stores might still have stacks of old records in the basement. So we had kind of a partnership and we didn’t act as a traditional jazz publication, although we ran a wonderful series of articles by the guy who owned Dial Records about bebop, which I found very instructive. At the end of the first year, he found a place for forty bucks a month, about a half block from my dorm room and we opened a store there called The Blue Note Shop and after a year or two, he got out of it and I moved it out. From there, I flunked my last semester in college. I was going to take business courses and become a movie cameraman. So I just sort of got trapped in the music and I’m so dumb that it took me forty years before I realized not only do I enjoy being around the music more than I would have enjoyed being a cameraman, I am better at this than I would have been at that, I think. I would have had to live in Los Angeles and not get to live in a good city like Chicago.


FJ: When your partner departed, why did you not follow suit?

BOB KOESTER: I had my nose open. There was an old drummer who had access to a very colorful character, a Russian Jewish guy, who had a couple of record stores. And when his wife died, she had bought one store and he ran the other. The old downtown store had turned into a kind of a warehouse. The guy had bought the stress stocks of old records during the Depression, but he was very finicky about who he would let buy stuff there. And this drummer had access to the guy. He decided to get out of the business and we bought his inventory on a consignment basis. We got enough money out of it for him that he just gave us the rest of the records and he also gave us a mailing list. I joined the St. Louis Jazz Club. The Jazz Report was something that I put out whenever I felt like I had something to say as an ad for the store. The Jazz Club would pay the mailing cost because I would run a transcript of the meetings to their members. We had gray and white issues because I could never quite get the ink black enough. Eventually, I gave it away and I am a little perturbed because he started again at volume one and so there are two volume ones of two different issues, something like ten years apart. Now there is a Jazz Report magazine in Canada, so it must have been a good idea.


FJ: When did the record store become a record label?

BOB KOESTER: Well, probably almost at the same time, ’51, ’52, college year. I did business out of the dorm. I had thought until recently that I had recorded my first album in ’52, but I am not really sure at this moment. I don’t have the actual tape of that first album. One block north from school was a club and I drank beer because I didn’t like it. I liked bourbon, which is what I drink now. But I could make one beer last all night and that cost me twelve and a half cents a set. That was pretty good.


FJ: You were able to witness the formation of the AACM.

BOB KOESTER: In the early Sixties. They were formed in ’63 or ‘4 and their first record date was ’66.


FJ: What prompted you to record the various members of the AACM?

BOB KOESTER: We had this committee that didn’t have formal meetings. Chuck Nessa in the meetings and so were others whose taste in jazz I respected. They were into Ellington rather than Kenton. That was a plus. They were into this music because I certainly wasn’t. My perception ran as far as the knowledge that jazz goes through changes. Every decade, every era, or every couple of decades, or now, every hundred years will produce another type of jazz. Jazz changes from one city to another as times change and environment changes, the music changes. I thought this was a reflection of the anger and a rebellion and the realization of being screwed out of their rights. To me, jazz is very much a black faith. That doesn’t mean that Art Pepper can’t play his ass off. But essentially, it is a black music. One of my tests is, what is the attitude of the musician towards blues? Some of them are very snobbish about it, but they do play it. It is an essential. It is the core of jazz. To me, there is really no difference between jazz and blues. It is all the same music. It is gospel. It is jazz. It is blues. It is not one body of music. It is a tree that we hope will keep growing, although I wonder sometimes. We have had avant-garde jazz for thirty-five years. That is a third of the history of jazz. No probably more like a fourth because I think jazz probably started right after the Civil War with the brass bands. That is what it was. All these guys said to record Roscoe andJoseph and they were discovering the guys.


FJ: You mentioned Chuck Nessa, who went onto form his own label, Nessa Records. Have you given any thought to acquiring the masters from Nessa to release on Delmark?

BOB KOESTER: I think anytime Chuck Nessa wanted to sell his masters, I think I would hear about it. I would certainly be in on the bidding. I would love to. It is a great catalog. It is in many ways, percentage wise, a better catalog than mine. I have recorded some guys that later I have come to realize were not quite a good as I had thought they were. I have done a few deals simply because guys wanted records and they made deals with me. If they come to me and say that they want to make a record and I pay them with records, it could happen if I thought they had something going, but I don’t think Chuck ever has. It is always recording guys that absolutely, historically must be recorded. I don’t think he wants to sell it at all. It is his life’s work. It would be a shame if he did. I wish he could afford to operate the label a little more. If Iever had a serious windfall and had all my real estate paid for, I would front him the money. That is one of the most valuable people, four or five people, in my employment over the years that have been extremely important in my development.


FJ: You also employed Bruce, the founder of Alligator Records.

BOB KOESTER: Oh, yeah. I am proud as hell of Bruce. I wish Chuck had done as well as Bruce did. But Bruce was always very smart about where the market is. Bruce mixes to the market. I hope he doesn’t think that is a negative thing. He knows what people want. Bruce and I used to have terrible arguments about his mixes. He mixes exactly what people want. My mixes had a lot more emphasis on the vocals, but Bruce was a guitar player and the white blues market is more interested in guitars than the singer.


FJ: In a few years, Delmark will be celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, do you recall where you contemplated closing the shop?

BOB KOESTER: Well, I never got very serious about the records as a means for earning a living. We have been able to occasionally achieve a licensing deal that brings in some cash and we have been able to use that, actually,real estate is where some of that has gone. We just got a little taste from Japan and we took half of it and put it down on the Delmark studio building and that cut our mortgage down by a third. That was nice. When we bought the old place down on Lincoln, although I did get the money in time, I was counting on a taste from another Japanese label. The Japanese built my real estate empire. I’ve made more money with real estate in the last ten years than I have made on Delmark. We bought Lincoln Avenue for thirty-two grand back in 1972 and sold it for a hundred and eighty-five grand, but taxes were a motherfucker (laughing). Happily, we live and work in a neighborhood that yuppies have discovered. It is a charming neighborhood. I live a block and a half from the river and work. I go to a place called the Pancake House for breakfast damn near every morning. I do a crossword and the crossword kind of wakes me up.


FJ: Sounds like the good life.

BOB KOESTER: It is (laughing).


Fred Jung is Jazz Weekly's Editor-In-Chief. Comments?  Email Fred.