Here's a little bit of Bob's Delmark history:
- When Koester was a child growing up in Wichita, Kansas, popular music was in the throws of the Big Band craze. He spent afternoons listening to Fats Waller, Zutty Singleton, Barney Bigard and Coleman Hawkins on the radio. As a teenager, Koester sought out live performances anywhere he could catch them. At the age of fourteen he witnessed a concert that featured Count Basie, Jimmy Rushing and Illinois Jacquet. Searching for artists such as these became a passion.
"In high school I saw Lionel Hampton. Hamp used to come and play at the Forum. It was for black people but they let whites sit in the balcony. By the last set everybody kinda' forgot about racial barriers. Everybody was out on the floor dancing. I went back there two or three times to see Hamp. Once I went to a place called the Rock Castle Supper Club for a session that involved Clifford Brown. In my last year of high school I heard Lonnie Johnson was in town. I remember Lonnie played violin which seemed to be electronically amplified. I tried to visit him the next day but he left town before I got there. I called him and he said, 'Man I was up all night, call me back in three hours.' Three hours later, Mr. Johnson was checked out. Later on when I met him I kidded him about it. I said, 'you had this starry-eyed fan in Kansas and you screwed him by leaving town, checking out before he could talk with you.' "
Koester began collecting records in high school, but due to the particular type of music he favored he couldn't just go to the local record store and pick up a few discs. To find them he searched secondhand stores and the back rooms of juke box operators.
"A lot of the music I liked was out of print. In those terribly barren years right after World War II the major labels had satisfied the demand for phonograph records by reissues. During the war there was a ban, and after the war the ban was over and there was a big boom and they all jumped on Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, all that shitty pop music of the late forties. It was a vocalist thing so instrumental music was very much out of favor with the American public, the young people particularly. By this time I really zeroed in on twenties' jazz and you just couldn't find it, there was little or nothing in print. I loved jazz, but the blues was part of it. Jazz fans start buying blues records because Louie Armstrong is on this Bessie Smith record, Coleman Hawkins is on this Ida Cox record and eventually the blues gets next to you. To me it was all the same, it was all important."
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