In the latest in our series of Q&As with Australia’s record label bosses Birdland Records’ Kieran Stafford discusses his new releases, retail trends and the state of the local music scene.
Jazz Australia: What are you releasing soon under the Birdland label?
Kieran Stafford: We’ve got four coming up within the next two months – Steve Hunter Band, the Jazzgroove Mothership Orchestra live with Florian Ross, Tony Gorman and Bobby Singh, which we recorded in the shop – so it’s a “Live at Birdland”. And, finally, the Judy Bailey Trio.
JA: How do you select what to release? Is it largely a case of being approached by a musician with a master tape?
KS: Sometimes it’s that. We reactivated the label with David Theak’s Theak-tet album “Old School” about two years ago and it went from there. Likewise with James Muller’s album “Kaboom”. I knew he had recorded it but he wasn’t sure what he was going to do with it. I said, ‘left me have a listen to it’. The only thing wrong with it was the tracks were in the wrong order; the sequence of the album didn’t work. So we changed them around, put a cover on and put it out.
JA: Is that something you have a good ear for?
KS: It’s really important. After years of flogging people’s CDs I’ve found that the public / customers in the store generally don’t listen to anything much more than the first three of four tracks of an album. So if track seven is brilliant – tough. People probably aren’t going to get to it unless the first three grab you. It’s like a one-two-three knock-out punch.
JA: Your upcoming releases are quite diverse in style. You obviously don’t have a “Birdland sound” in mind?
KS: No. If you go back to the first thing we did, the Mike Nock record Touch, that was solo piano, then there was Mark Simmonds. Then there was a bit of a gap and then Theak’s record and Oynsemble Melbourne, the big band version of version of Coltranes_”Ascension”_ and the soundtrack to “Solo” . We’ve also been involved in the reissue of the Judy Bailey Trio – Colors, Ted Vining’s “Numbers 1” and**Brian Brown** “Bells make me sing”. But no, there’s no sound as such. It’s not like Blue Note back in the ‘50s.
JA: If there isn’t a house style as such, I imagine the releases nonetheless reflect your taste?
KS: Yeah. And I’ve had to knock more than a few things back – not because they weren’t any good but because we just couldn’t do them. Constraints of time and finances and everything else.
JA: Are you a masochist running a jazz label as well as retailing the music?
KS: Definitely.
JA: Or is it clever vertical integration?
KS: There’s a bit of that. Retailing is a strange form of masochism. It’s fun as well.
What are some of the key retail trends at the moment?
KS: There’s a lot more independent stuff.
JA: Is that just because the major labels are releasing less jazz?
KS: Probably. There’s a cyclical thing in the record business. Independents get big, big companies buy them up, shut them down and it starts up again. The big guys don’t know what they’re doing anymore. They may never have known but they certainly don’t at the moment – they’re clueless. They’re all running around thinking they’re in the digital business but they have forgotten they’re in the music business. It’s not about delivery systems, it’s about music.
JA: How are downloads working in the jazz area?
KS: It’s advertising as far as I can see. It can have some effect on cd sales etc but there’s not much money in it. Except for Apple ! Downloads seem to have plateaued to some extent at about 10% of the business but some artists use them to good effect. Dave Douglas’s new record came out before Christmas as a download – a 10-CD set. The amount of people who wanted to download it did and then it stopped. So what they then did was put out all the new compositions plus a couple of old ones in a two-CD set. So it was a sort of a “Best of Live at …” whatever.
JA: That was on his own Greenleaf label.?
KS: Yeah. So I think what that shows is that they realized the market is not all going one way with downloads. It’s like wine – you can get it in a box or a bottle. It’s just a different way of getting it. Cassettes were once the biggest part of the record business – about 60 percent were prerecorded cassettes but I never sold any – it was all vinyl in those days. People who bought cassettes were what I called “greatest hits” listeners who might buy one a year.
JA: My record collection started out with cassettes.
KS: Until you heard what records sounded like in comparison. It’s much the same thing with downloads – the quality generally is appalling. People who listen to them don’t know what good sound is. But then most people to a large extent have never known about sound. Hi-Fi was always considered a kind of geeky thing and now computers are the geeky thing, but the niche areas for fans are always going to be there. Either on cd or vinyl or some other physical format.
We’re looking at setting something up where you can download tracks from our site but it is something to advertise the music. People can get one track and if they like it they can buy the CD. Or go see the band.
Norah Jones sold sod all of her last album by download in Australia. People wanted to buy the album. In the first week of release about 50,000 bought the CD and 500 bought the downloaded version.
JA: What local jazz releases are doing reasonably well?
KS: Matt MaMahon’s albums, Phil Slater’s new one, Stu Hunters, Joespeh Tawadros, some of ours – especially Kaboom. Tim [Dunn] hasn’t done much for a while on Rufus [Records] but if Bernie [McGann] puts a new album out people will get interested in his old records again. The Jazzgroove releases have been doing pretty well. And JazzHead have been releasing some really excellent stuff.
JA: What’s your assessment of the quality of the local albums?
KS: I think the music that is coming out of Australia at the moment is the equal – if not better – than just about anything coming out of America and is up there with all the European stuff. And it’s completely undervalued by the mainstream media. No one outside the scene knows about it. It’s a real Golden Age for music right now but the media would rather write an article about the “death of jazz” or the “death of records”. I could probably get front page of The Sydney Morning Herald if I closed the shop down but get them to do something on the fact that we’ve going for nearly 16 years – forget it. They only want to write about disaster. Fact is, the music is probably better now than ever.
Yes, you’re right. There is an extraordinary depth to the local scene at the moment.
**Matt MaMahon’s trio album [Ellipsis] is as good as anything I’ve heard on ECM by people like Tord Gustafson. Actually, Matt’s is a much better record, I think. The local jazz scene, and I include Melbourne and the rest of Australia in the word “local”, is producing some astonishingly good music in spite of everything.
Photo: Steve Hunter, whose new album – Dig My Garden is now out on Birdland Records.
