The story behind the sign
Jazz Record Mart and Delmark Records
Following on my last post about the Green Mill, a famous Chicago jazz club, I thought I’d stick to the jazz theme for this edition of Island in the City. On another note, I’m happy to say the live organ donation I was under consideration for to a family member is a go. This week in fact. This means that I will probably be out of commission most/all of December. Hopefully, in 2023 I can return to more regular postings for this newsletter. Thanks for your readership and patience.
When I first moved to Lincoln Square in 2001, I thought I had it made. It was a neighborhood with every kind of business a girl could want, all within a 6-block radius. Mostly independent businesses too—the Starbucks on the corner was still an outlier and one the locals didn’t let in without a fight. There was a movie theater, a used books store, a collectible toys shop, an apothecary, a hardware store (two actually), a video rental (Darkstar forever), a local sandwich shop, an old-fashioned German deli, two greasy spoons, and a record store: Laurie’s Planet of Sound. A real old-school record store, with vinyl, CDs, cassettes, t-shirts, posters, books, videos, and rock band buttons.
I’ve never been a music snob—my taste is mostly hopelessly mainstream and hand-me-down from Boomer and Silent Gen cultivations. But when you’re in your 20s, an indie record store is one of those beacons that even the uncool—especially the uncool—gravitate toward. The hope is for coolness by association, the idea being that just by living near a place like this, the hipness will rub off on you and transform you from loser into wannabe into, at long last, someone cool.
Well, that didn’t happen. But I still enjoyed the neighborhood. When I first moved there, I even thought I scored a jackpot with two cool record stores within walking distance. Because a little farther up Lincoln Ave., across the street from the Jewel, appeared to be another funky one, going by the sign hanging over the sidewalk.
BERjNaARDzzS record Jrm mart
Sounds aweZZsome.
Alas, it was just an old sign, the record store long closed. Still, in the years to come, my eye was always drawn to the sign on the way to Jewel or whenever I was walking up the street elsewhere. But I never gave it much thought beyond wondering why no one took the sign down.
Fast forward to August 2021. After an afternoon outdoor Irish session at Martyrs with a couple friends, I decide to walk down Lincoln to check out my old stomping grounds. To see what’s changed and such. It’s funny when you visit a neighborhood after a few years away. It never surprises me how some of the haunts that were hopping and successful back in the day are long gone while the strugglers or the details that had been left-over relics from another time even back then are still hanging around. Like that closed record store sign. There it was, soaking up the late summer sun, dangling off the front of what is now an alderman’s HQ.
It got me wondering again. Who was Bernard anyway? When was the store active? When did it go out of business? And why the bad lettering on the sign?
I went home and started consulting Professor Google. Plugging in the address (4243 N. Lincoln) along with the name “Bernard” and the words “records” and “record store.” What I discovered turned out to be worlds cooler than living near Laurie’s Planet of Sound or Reckless had ever been, even for one-time wannabes like me.
One of the first clues was a Flickr profile with a photo of the sign taken in 2009 and some commentary about its origins. William (Flickr profile owner) noted a T in the middle of the sign and suggested at least three businesses claiming it. He also said he found an architecture business card in the door with the T logo. Sure enough, a 2002 list of architectural services vendors by the Chicago Public Schools Board of Education shows a joint architects’ venture owned by Tripartite and Central Studio at the address.
But further down in William’s comments, someone else (good ol’ Allan PRO) pointed out the sign’s “Jrm” logo on the outer edge looked just like the one for a famed record store downtown.
Turned out Allan PRO was onto something. Yes, indeed, once upon a time this humble North Side storefront was an outlet of Jazz Record Mart, one of the most renowned record stores in the country. It was also the location of Delmark Records, a pioneering—and still rocking—indie jazz and blues label.
So that solved a significant part of the mystery. (I never did find out who Bernard was.) It also maybe explains why no one’s taken the sign down, even though both Delmark and Jazz Record Mart relocated or made their main home at other locations in the city long ago. A wise neighborhood would want to keep a sign like this around to preserve the cultural history of a city famous worldwide for its blues and jazz. And a wise city would want to preserve an important cultural landmark.
In 2016, downtown Chicago lost its great indie Jazz Record Mart store. In 2021, the city and world lost its owner and Delmark’s founder, Bob Koester. Fortunately, Koester had a survivor’s spirit, and his record store lives on in another name and location, while his label also has a new home and a new generation to keep the music spinning.
The story of Jazz Record Mart is something of a peripatetic one. Koester was a native of Kansas who came to Chicago by way of St. Louis. He was born in the 30s, the era of Big Bands, but was a collector of blues as well as jazz in his teens. After high school he moved to Missouri to study cinematography, but the record bug got in the way. He sold records by mail out of his dorm room, then set up a record shop—K&F Sales, renamed the Blue Note Record Shop—with another collector he’d met at the St. Louis Jazz Club. Eventually, Koester and his partner split up the inventory and Koester opened up a shop of his own on Delmar Street.
In 1953, when he was just 21, Koester started a record label, Delmar Records, subsidized by his retail sales. The first artists he signed was a St. Louis-based jazz group called the Windy City Six. He also signed local master bluesmen of the 20s and 30s era like Speckled Red, Big Joe Williams, James Crutchfield, and J.D. Short. The label was renamed to Delmark due to a licensing issue. Within a few years, Koester was also buying the masters of out-of-print recordings from other labels like Apollo, United, and Regal. After traveling to Chicago to purchase the rights to Paramount masters, he took his business here.
Soon after arriving in Chicago in 1958, Koester purchased Seymour’s Jazz Mart, a record store at 439 S. Wabash, for $1,500. Koester moved the business briefly to 42 E. Chicago Ave, then in 1962 he took it to 7 W. Grand Ave, where it took the name Jazz Record Mart. In 1979, he shifted the store to a larger space at 11 W. Grand and moved Delmark to 4243 N. Lincoln Ave.
Koester built Jazz Record Mart into a mecca for music collectors, despite also building a reputation for being cantankerous with staff and careless of customers’ tastes. A great Reader story about him describes him as essentially steering customers away from their own interests to his own, using the store turntable to play what he wanted more than he did leaving it free for would-be buyers to play a prospective purchase. He was difficult to work with. He didn’t advertise much and was ride or die when it came to print mail-order catalogs long after every other kind of business had created websites. He had an odd obsession with how packages should be taped, and he kept inventory with color-coded index cards, eschewing a computerized system.
Maybe true music lovers never minded. Robert Plant and the Rolling Stones were said to be regular customers whenever they were in Chicago. Blues harmonica player Charlie Musselwhite was an employee. Big Joe Williams supposedly slept in the store’s cellar whenever gigs brought him to the city. Junior Wells supposedly had his own key. Several histories of the store share a story from Nessa Records founder Chuck Nessa, a former store manager who recalled getting into a shouting match about modern jazz with Mike Bloomfield of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band while working behind the register one day.
In the mid-90s, Jazz Record Mart was forced to move again to make way for a Denver-based microbrewery called Rock Bottom. No pun intended, even if it did seem this was a sign for things to come all around downtown Chicago’s independent business scene. This was also the era when the records biz was giving up on vinyl. But not Bob Koester.
Jazz Record Mart made its next and final home at 27 E. Illinois, a comparably posh location that would eventually make Bob’s brainchild neighbors with the Trump hotel completed in 2009 at 401 N. Wabash. (It’s also almost right on the spot of the first murder recorded in Chicago, where John Kinzie stabbed Jean LaLime to death in 1812.) If Bob was a bit too old school for his own good when it came to index card inventories and a foolish fondness for scotch tape, his stubborn love for vinyl turned out to be a wise move. In 2010, Reader music critic Peter Margasak voted Jazz Record Mart the best place in the city for vinyl, noting its stock included 20,000 78s.
As for Delmark and the Lincoln Ave. location, in a 1995 Chicago Tribune article about the Rock Bottom takeover and another in 1993 about the used CD sales biz, Koester says this was the site of a used records/CDs store called Collector’s Record Mart. Even if that became the official name and MO at some point, the sign on the storefront let everyone know this was still legendary Jazz Record Mart turf.
Not that Delmark alone wasn’t legend enough. Its output is outstanding. Delmark recorded jazz from the traditional to the avant-garde and blues from acoustic Delta style to electrified Chicago blues. I know next to nothing about jazz and blues, but even I can read a roster of Delmark artists and blink at the number of bigwigs: Junior Wells, Sun Ra, Buddy Guy, Arthur Crudup (you know him as the guy Elvis took his first Sun Records hit “That’s All Right, Mama” from), Sunnyland Slim, T-Bone Walker, Sleepy John Estes, Magic Sam, Otis Rush, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Eddie C. Campbell…if I left out a name that bona fide music buffs think I shouldn’t have, it’s only because I don’t want this post to turn into a Wikipedia-meets-Buzzfeed-style listicle.
Delmark’s impact is also felt in the number of labels started by former employees of Jazz Record Mart and the Delmark label: Alligator Records, Nessa Records, Earwig Records, Rooster Blues Records. Delmark even got around to recording some women: Shirley Johnson, Zora Young, Nicole Mitchell, Demetria Taylor.
In the few years before he died, Koester’s businesses went through some major changes. In 2016, rising rents pushed him out of his location on Illinois St. downtown. The move was mourned widely. Downtown Chicago didn’t need to lose one of the few truly independent, home-grown businesses left—especially one selling books and music, which are increasingly hard to come by in the modern brick-and-mortar retail world. I’d only been in the store a couple times myself. (I may have finally tracked down a copy of Jerry Lee Lewis’ Live at the Star Club that I’d been searching for years there—it used to be an import you had to order from overseas.) I remember being in there and feeling a bit intimidated by the collection, though the staff must’ve been nice enough to not have left a bad impression. (I have the memory of an elephant for stuff like that, and the grudge-holding capability of any Irish person worth their salt.)
Working at the Bridgehouse Museum just across the river in 2015, I used to recommend Jazz Record Mart to the rare visitor who was looking for a store or place to go to that was off the beaten path and not another chain or tourist trap. It was honestly the one and only downtown business I felt I could recommend.
In true survivor style, Koester moved on to another store, another neighborhood: the tiny but still essential Bob’s Blues & Jazz Mart at 3419 W. Irving Park Rd. But only after selling the Jazz Record Mart name and inventory to an online collector’s vendor, Wolfgang’s Vault. In 2018, he sold Delmark to two local musicians, Julia Miller and Elbio Barilari. The label operates out of its studio location at 4121 N. Rockwell, not far from the old 4243 N. Lincoln shop. The new owners have upgraded Delmark’s practices by finally digitizing its archive and diversifying its distribution platforms, as well as continuing the label’s legacy of recording great jazz and blues artists.
In 2020, after Koester suffered a stroke, his son took over Bob’s Blues & Jazz Mart. Koester passed away at age 88 in May 2021. His obit ran in the New York Times and The Guardian. One of his life honors had been his induction into the Blues Hall of Fame back in 1996, one of the few non-performer inductees.
In recent years, it’s become a sort of a default response to look askance at white producers or “appropriators” of black music. The assumption is that someone is overstepping cultural boundaries and taking on the role of the exploiter. But such views oversimplify American culture and history, to put it mildly, and allow no quarter for the joy and love of music, for straight-up sincere fanhood.
Koester was motivated by a sincere love of jazz and blues, going back to his childhood and funneled through what was originally an aspiring filmmaker’s eye. Histories of Koester’s store and label credit him with helping to “document” Chicago’s music scene and development. He collected film throughout his life as well as records and screened films as well as hosted concerts. His record store became a strategy for subsidizing the recording. Meanwhile, he once said his recording strategy was based on longevity: “The whole idea with Delmark has never been to have a hit record, but to sell the records over many, many years. You don’t sell much right out of the box, but you can sell in small amounts forever.” That’s not the MO of a greedy capitalist out to make a quick buck and exploit others for the sake of the market, but the course of a connoisseur—a real fan.
It’s a happy thing Delmark has survived and a few indie record stores persist in this era of Spotify and Amazon. But will the city consider making some of these important music sites a landmark? Or are they just waiting for these places to get gobbled up by the next generation of developers or just rust away until they fall down? The fact that Jazz Record Mart got pushed out for a microbrewery in the 90s, then pushed out again due to rising rents doesn’t speak well for the city. (And look what we did to the old Maxwell Street Market.) Koester rolled with it, but if Chicago and the younger generation doesn’t take care, “Rolling Stone” will go down as just the name of an irrelevant old counterculture magazine or an aging white British blues band—and no one will remember what this city ever had to do with it.
Here’s a video of one of Delmark’s and Chicago’s greatest…