It's funny you know because we had Luther Allison signed to a contract for three records, and he didn't want to honour it because he said we weren't producing him enough. I can understand if a guy wants to go back and fix some of his mistakes, but to be honest, I can't afford for some guy to spend twenty hours in the studio working on one song trying to make it perfect.
Anyway, I don't want perfection. I want the balls that I hear in the club - the sound the guys have when they're at the point in the night when they've really hit their stride is what I want to record. When I pick somebody to record, I do it because I like their ideas, what they're trying to do on stage, with the music, not because they're technicians. Some of the guys I've recorded really don't play guitar all that well - they just sort of strum along if that - but the things they do with their voices is amazing, and that's what I want. What they do that's amazing, that makes them who they are.
How would you describe your relationship with the musicians you work with?
Well it's usually a good relationship right up to the point when they become you're employee. Nah, it varies from group to group and person to person, you know. Like I said it's probably one of the reason I do so few royalty recordings so there's never any questions about money or being screwed. We just don't have the sales to make royalty deals worth anyone's while, especially the musician involved.
Delmark was one of the first labels to record avant-garde Jazz music that came out of Chicago in the sixties. How did that association come about?
I'd always been aware that jazz had gone through and goes through changes. All you had to do was listen to what was being done from decade to decade. There was barrelhouse and boogie woogie in the twenties and thirties, swing and big band in the thirties and forties and after that be-bop. So when I was first starting out in St. Louis, back in the fifties, I had the first Sun Ra disc in my store even back then, and that was fifty-six.
One of the albums that I always made sure to keep in stock was the famous Massy Hall concert.
Massy Hall in Toronto Canada?
Yeah that's the one. Anyway that recording was of Dizzy Gilispe, Charlie Parker, Charlie Mingus, Bud Powell, and Max Roach - hell it's the only recording that is listed under five separate names, because you could put it under anyone of those guys in your catalogue and it wouldn't matter.
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