JOHN STORM ROBERTS – AN APPRECIATION

Always been more than a bit ambivalent about the whole concept of mentoring, at least when it applies to the music world we run in. You just learn and soak up everything from everyone you come in contact with, peers or veteranos, and toss in whatever you can contribute from any particular areas on special interest you may have, so the concept of mentor seems a bit overblown.
To narrow down to one genre as an example, I learned blues from reading liner notes and the odd book by Pete Welding and Robert Palmer, Mike Rowe, Neil Slaven and others in the UK blues division. I learned Texas-Louisiana music from Bill Bentley, jump blues from Phast Phreddie and more about R&B rarities than I could ever hope to absorb from Don Waller and the Phastman. But it seems a bit overblown and to call these friends or people who I only know through print as mentors.
But there is one person who could genuinely qualify as a mentor since he essentially introduced me to a wider world of world music: the late John Storm Roberts.
First contact came through print, naturally enough, through reading him in the Village Voice on various Latin or R&B artists. I picked up his pair of books, The Latin Tinge and Black Music of Two Worlds fairly early on and truthfully found them a bit on the dry and overly ethnomusicological side for my taste and knowledge level then. It was a surprise to get to know John more closely, albeit still indirectly through phone conversations inspired by the Original Music mail order service cum label he started in order to spotlight some of the rarities he had unearthed in various musical nooks and crannies since buying his first ‘world music’ disc in 1949, a 78 by Portuguese fado godmother Amalia Rodrigues.
The incongruity of his dry humor and classic very British accent always made me chuckle as he recounted tales of being a fledgling reporter posted in Kenya in the early ‘60s, the very height of Beatlemania, and having the audacity or naivete or nerve or all three to think that since he was there, it was his job to just go out and learn about the local pop music there. That triggered an odyssey that some 25 years later would spawn an assortment of rarities culled from Africa and other points well off the beaten tracks, music either released on the Original Music label or distributed through the mail order service and vividly described in the catalogue newsletters.
So the catalogue newsletter, with vivid capsule descriptions written by Roberts, became my entry point and guide to a rich assortment of music styles. I never would have found out about zouk in depth, discovered the Sabri Brothers for qawwali one step beyond Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, or fleshed out my knowledge of African music considerably without it. And despite the considerable expertise Roberts had and expansive network of connections among those chroniclers of world music before the term existed, he was anything but a diehard folk roots purist. During one interview 20-odd years ago , he told me that he was currently into Cambodian rock ‘n’ roll, a good decade before a few L.A. alternabozos even began sniffing around that area and ultimately turned themselves into Dengue Fever. (And yes, I bought one of those cassettes…or was it the one by the Elvis of Vietnam circa 1990?)
I know the Original Music newsletter is the reason I’ve been coming across these CDs on labels like Sonodisc by African artists who I can’t remember a damned thing about as far as personal details or recording history but are in my collection purely on Roberts’ recommendation –and they’re staying there because the music still sounds great. There are the label compilations themselves, some serving as valuable introductory surveys and others I might have picked for reasons ranging from the ridiculous to the sublime – I mean how could you possibly resist a title like Dr. Ganja’s Polytonality Blues by some Nigerian bandleader named Orlando Owoh (why would you want to)? And the counterpoint is found on the final track of Money Be No Sand, one of Original Music’s early compilations, with Charlotte Dada’s impossibly gorgeous, heart-wrenching version of “Don’t Let Me Down” backed by what sounds like a basic rock band augmented by a Ghanaian cowbell gamelan orchestra (really).
One final example of how Roberts and Original Music expanded my horizons and introduced me to an artist I would never have known existed: I read several times in the newsletter about featured discs by La Niña de los Peines, who ranks the roots godmother of flamenco, that piqued my interest. One night I went to see An Angel at the My Table, the film about the Australian writer Janet Frame. Part of the movie is set in Spain, and one scene showing the wounded-by-love Frame alone on a rocky coastline had flamenco with a woman singer as the background music.
And I said to myself, “That has to be La Niña de los Peines.”
I just intuitively knew that was her, even though I had never heard a note she sang before or even listened to much flamenco because John Storm Roberts’ catalogue descriptions were so vivid and her presence in the catalogue was an implicit endorsement that this was music worth checking if you had the slightest bit of interest. I remember sitting there in the theater waiting for the credits to roll along for confirmation and sure enough, there was the name La Niña de los Peines. And the next time the catalogue showed up in my mailbox, her disc went into the order that got mailed back.
We sort of drifted out of contact as interests diverged and the rest of the music world discovered the music that Original Music had been instrumental in exposing for me. I always kept thinking of dropping him a line from time to time, every few months or so it popped into my mind but unfortunately it went the way of so many things you want to do and should do but never seem to get around to doing. It’s something I regret, just as I regret the belated nature of this remembrance, but I do feel fortunate to have known him and certainly enriched by the way he expanded my musical worldview.