Dan Storper is the founder and CEO of Putumayo Records. Over the past 20 years, Putumayo has produced some 200 world music compilations, and a number of fine artist releases, as well as DVDs, calendars and other items. Putumayo’s distinctively colorful, hand-painted look is instantly recognizable. And no doubt, you’ve seen Putumayo products in shops, cafes, restaurants, record stores (if you can still find one), and the shelves and coffee tables of friends and acquaintances all over the world.
The label has taken criticism over the years—for emphasizing the most accessible sounds and artists and avoiding the “heavy” stuff, for dealing with record labels and producers (sometimes dubious ones) rather than artists themselves, and—let’s face it—for being so damn successful! But, say what you will, Putumayo has been a major force in the dissemination of global sounds over the past two decades. It has opened ears, opened doors, and generally helped move the needle in terms of building audience for the music in an era of media proliferation and short attention spans. For Dan, it’s been a labor of love every step of the way. Afropop’s Banning Eyre sat down for a chat with Dan in New York recently. Here’s their conversation.
Banning Eyre: So, anniversaries, boy. We’re celebrating 25, and you’re celebrating 20. It’s really an occasion to contemplate a lot of activity over a long time. But I want to ask you about the beginnings of Putumayo, how it all started. You were a clothing company that became a record label. How did that happen?
Dan Storper: Well, I think life is often a series of somewhat serendipitious circumstances, occasions, happenings. I was actually flying back from a trip to Bali where I was designing and importing some crafts and clothing ,and I stopped off in San Francisco on my way back and went to see an exhibit at the de Young Museum that a friend of mine actually was curating, a textile exhibit from Asia. I was walking through Golden Gate Park, and I started hearing some sounds out of the corner of my—just kind of obliquely, I heard music playing and it sounded interesting. So I said, “Let me just walk over and check it out.” There was a group of maybe 70 or 80 people – not a big crowd – and an African band playing ,and it was literally their last, say, two songs. It was a group called Kotojo, a Nigerian-American group, a big band – maybe 9, 10 people.
B.E: Kotojo. Yes. They were based out there then.
D.S: They were based on Oakland. This was probably either ’90 or ’91. And I basically stopped in my tracks—and this is something that has happened to me over the years, it happened when I first heard Oliver Mtukudzi, it happened when I first heard Habib—where there was something about the music that was so captivating and so uplifting and it had that kind of effect on the crowd: the crowd was rapturous. Even though it was a small crowd, they were dancing. I was struck by the way there was an Asian woman dancing with an African-American guy and it was no dance that I’d seen, they were just moving to the music. And I was struck by that magic moment where, somehow, all the cares, all the worries seemed to disappear, there was just great music and people having a good time in a beautiful setting in Golden Gate Park. And then I flew back a couple days later to New York, and I was walking into one of my clothing stores – which is mostly clothing and handicrafts from around the world.
B.E: How many stores did you have at that point?
D.S: At that time, I had seven stores. And I was designing five clothing collections a year—clothing and handicraft collections to be sold. I had two assistant designers, and I had kind of morphed into a designer myself. It wasn’t really anything I’d intended to do, but after years of traveling to South America and Asia and buying stuff, I’d always felt like I’d wanted to tinker with it—the colors, I didn’t like the way the textiles mixed, and I said “Oh, it could be nicer if you could take this design and mix it with this design”—so I kind of, without any background, morphed into a clothing designer. Same thing with handicrafts.
B.E: How long had Putamayo existed at that point?
D.S: The first Putamayo store started in ’75; it opened in New York City. I majored in Latin American Studies and graduated college in ’73, and 6 months after working to earn money to go to South America, I took my first trip to South America and literally on the first day in Barranquilla, I saw some vendors selling woven fabric that I thought was great, and I thought, “That’s what I want to do. I want to travel and collect crafts and import them,” without having a clue of where or how I’d sell them.
But the music thing came at a moment that was really important because I was burnt out on the clothing business. You know, I’d been designing since really ’81. I opened the shops in ’75, imported for six or so years, then said, “Let me move into designing.” So I’d been doing it for about 12 years, 3-5 clothing collections a year. And then I just said, “Maybe there’s something here. This music is incredible.” And I was a member of a group called the Social Venture Network and Richard Foos, the founder of Rhino Records, was a member. And I got to know through a mutual friend, the people who had founded Banana Republic, and they had used a music service and were known for their music. And he introduced us, and we started talking, and he said, “You know, if you really want to create great music for your stores, I know this service that could help you put it together.”
So, after I got back from that San Francisco trip, I walked into one of my stores and they were playing thrash metal music, and I went, “Holy—this is so inappropriate!” It was an assistant manager named Rob playing the music, and I thank him to this day; he thought it was okay, it was his taste, and it actually became the basis for a lot of our business in the nontraditional market because you realize that there is a context and an ambiance that you’re trying to create when you have a store and the goal is to always be in sync, I think, for the customers.
B.E: So originally, the idea was to get music that would be appropriate for the stores.
D.S: For my own retail stores, without thinking that there was a business there really. So basically I started going to HMV [major record chain back in the day!]. Do you remember Viola Galloway?
B.E: I sure do. She was the buyer there. Great lady.
D.S: So Viola was working at HMV and she was one of the people I bumped into, and I
said, “I’m interested in getting African music and Latin and other music to play in my stores. What do you recommend?” And she turned me onto a bunch of people – early years Toure Kunda, Johnny Clegg, Angelique Kidjo, and a few others, and I started and I put together the first kind of mixtape—a four-hour tape with this company I met through Banana Republic—and I pretty much picked the music. It was African, Latin, Miriam Makeba, Juan Luis Guierra, to people like Bob Dylan, and Van Morrison, and Bonnie Raitt, so I mixed it in and just tried to keep it upbeat. So when our tapes were sent to the stores in ’92, I started getting calls from the managers that there was something going on. The staff was bopping around; they’d never seen them happier; customers were coming up to the counter every couple of minutes asking about the songs that were playing. And I just said, “Wow, there’s something there.”
So at the next Social Venture Network conference, where I had met Richard Foos, I went up to him and said, “Richard, there’s so much interest in this world music that we’re playing in our stores. How’d you like to collaborate on a CD?” And he said, “We’ve thought about doing world music, never found a way to do it, let’s collaborate!” And we worked together on it and released four albums through Rhino. And then they lost interest. They weren’t selling as much in the mainstream record market, so we kind of developed the business in a nontraditional way and then found a distributor and started doing it ourselves.
B.E: So the first four records came out on Rhino. Did they have the familiar Putumayo look we know now?
D.S: They did. I had started working with Nikola Heindel for the first albums. There was “The Best of World Music: African,” which I still think was one of the best Putamayo collections ever. That was the third album that I think came out. Then there was the first world vocal collection. Form there, we started doing it ourselves, and I was writing the liner notes, I was doing the research. That’s when I was introduced to Jacob Edgar and I thought, “You know, I can’t keep designing five clothing collections and, you know, running retail stores, and do this…”
B.E: So you were trying to do both at this point?
D.S: There was a four-year overlap. Basically, the first two releases came out in April of ’93 and I had all these stores – 7 stores – designing 5 clothing collections, and now trying to start a new business. So I invited Michael Kraus, who was an old friend, I invited him to help with the sales. He started Putamayo really, helped me get it started, and then we really started trying to develop the relationships with many of the accounts that were buying our clothing first and, you know, we tried to basically sell to both worlds—the traditional record stores and the nontraditional specialty stores—and there was a strong initial response. It was a moment—actually, I remember when I was trying to sequence the first Putamayo tape, I think I drove Rhino crazy—and I still drive my staff crazy. Initially it was done through cassettes, so if you can imagine trying to sequence with fast-forwarding and splicing—it was a nightmare to try and do.
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Dan Storper (Eyre 2013)[/caption]
I remember sitting there and playing the music for the staff, as I still do to this day, trying to get their feedback, and I had an assistant clothing designer who was from the Dominican Republic and she said, “I’ll bet you’d like this guy who I love from the Dominican Republic, Juan Luis Guerra.” And he was the first song on the first Putamayo album, “Ojalá que,” which is still one of the great songs of all time. Such a classic! So it wasn’t just Viola. I started reaching out to other people in the industry. There were many people who helped. And I started to see where Putamayo’s place needed to be, or should be, which is we weren’t Africa 401, we were really trying to introduce people to great music that they just wouldn’t know; they occasionally might be played on an NPR local affiliate, on a college station or something, but by and large, you had so little awareness of international music, despite the fact that there were relatively known artists like Johnny Clegg had a moment.
B.E: There’d been Graceland in 1986.
D.S: Right. And I remember back when Graceland came out that people… And this is one of the things that is one of the great challenges, where Putamayo can serve as an
introduction, and then you dig deeper, the idea being that Ladysmith Black Mambazo is a choir. When united with Paul Simon, that combination was something that people felt was fresh and something that was of interest. A lot of times the artists, who were already creating some really interesting and appealing hybrids, were just not known. And a lot of times I felt that in the early years, a lot of the writers that would write about it had already evolved their tastes to Africa 3 or 401, so the fact is that there was a gap. It took me years to fully appreciate people like Salif Keita or Youssou N’Dour, because initially that wasn’t the sound that was the universal sound—you know? So I think the sense I have is that I’ve grown a bit with the music and the audience has grown a bit with it.
But at its core, I think Putamayo is about great instrumentation, great melodies, great voices and, when it comes together, people can really feel it. And I think, if you took a hundred people off the streets of New York randomly, and you played them a great African song and a pop song from the local radio that’s a hit, I think you’d probably find a significant number of people say, “I actually prefer the African song.” It’s just they’re not getting a chance to hear it.
B.E: So true. Putamayo has done yeoman’s work worldwide in terms of opening doors for people and making them open their ears. But I actually think that education process has a long way to go. I mean we’ve been in the same game all these years. I remember in the early ‘90s, I was writing for the Boston Phoenix, but I was also working with Sean at Afropop. I’d gone on some trips so I kind of dove into the deep end with African music, went right into the heart of these scenes in Kinshasa and everything, but I was always being told by my editors at the Phoenix not to do what you’re saying, not to be in the 401 level. You’ve always got to be bringing people in, you’ve always got to be reminding them of how it connects with things that they know.
D.S: That’s rare! And it may have been the big distinction, the challenge for world music in general, to maintain a level of consciousness and sales in the U.S. marketplace. I remember when Sean [Barlow] put out the guide, the Afropop guide, and we distributed it to a lot of our retailers, and there were a bunch of people who really had fallen in love with African music. I remember some moments like giving – and this is, without my realizing it, in the early years of Putamayo – giving a Habib CD to Jackson Brown’s girlfriend, who then gave it to Jackson, who called me up a couple of days later and said, “We flipped out over this. We want to buy 75 copies to give to friends.” And then he went to Mali. Same thing happened with Bonnie Raitt.
B.E: Right, she got hooked up with both Oliver Mtukudzi and Habib.
D.S: Carlos Santana at the ’96 Olympics. I gave him a copy of our One World CD and he flipped over a couple of the artists and ended up working with them. So there’s this way in which the music can flow and reach other people. But I’ve been surprised that there hasn’t been a true breakout star in this world, and there hasn’t been a sustained level of interest and support. And I think part of it comes from the nature of the world of music as an ocean. We do our part as best we can to connect people to the great songs that are out there. When we released our Mali album, I was very happy with it – but it’s hard to release an album called Mali; people don’t necessarily know what it is. So it was not one of our more successful albums, even if it was one of our better albums. Whereas you sell an album called Cuba or you sell an album called French Café or, you know, everyone loves Brazilian music, so you know, I’ve always been struck by the distinction. But to this day, Acoustic Africa, which we worked on, you know, a couple of themed tours and Women of Africa continue to be consistently selling and appealing to people around the world.
B.E: And do you think that that has as much to do with anything as the actual title of the record? That the title is comprehensible, inviting, somehow familiar, it makes people take that next step to listening, and then they get there?
D.S: I think it’s a combination. If the music is great… Obviously I like all the albums we’ve put out, to varying degrees, but there are some really exceptional albums we’ve put out, I would say. When the music and the cover and the title all combine – so I think Latin Jazz, as an example, is one of our better albums. I think Arabic Groove is one of our better albums.
B.E: What have been the standout hits, the big sellers, the ones that have lasted? First, how many are there now?
D.S: Well, about two hundred, I’d say. And obviously, we tried to release artist albums.
B.E: We’ll talk about that too.
D.S: But I’d say, in the compilation realm, four of the best-selling albums have been Cuba, Arabic Groove, French Café, and World Playground. And that’s amazing to me. Arabic Groove came out just before 9/11 and people flipped out over the album before 9/11 and then, all of a sudden, it was like “Can we like this music?”
B.E: Yes, things became complicated for a while there.
D.S: It became complicated. And yet, over time, the music won over. And you know, the basic idea that the musicians were not fundamentalists, they were trying to kind of break through some of the stereotypes and the challenges and trying to present a positive side of these cultures and music.
B.E: And, in fact, for many people, 9/11 became ultimately a stimulus to curiosity. People wanted to know more about North African and Middle Eastern culture, and music was one way to find out.
D.S: I joke about this, but it’s half serious: the biggest sound-scanning market for the Arabic Groove release, percentage-wise, far and away, was the Virginia suburbs of D.C.,
and D.C. in general because, I think, every Langley, CIA, Pentagon person was interested. That was like the beginning, and then people started studying it. But I think fundamentally the music ultimately won over, and I feel like the other side of what Putamayo’s done is to show the connections between different musical styles. I remember first listening to Afro-Latino, which is one of our early albums, and the way in which Latin and African music connect.
On that Afropop trip that I did to Dakar, Senegal, while everyone else was going off to see some of the more traditional Afropop stuff, I ended up going to this little club two or three nights in a row where there were no more than 15 patrons. And there was a band, one of the artists that was kind of a rotating cast of Africando. One of the singers would be doing Afro-Latin music, and they were dancing salsa, and it was like this little club and I just found it so charming. That blend of African and Latin music coming together made a big impact on me. I feel like it helped us move into more of the Latin thing. So it was a segue from African, which I probably loved more deeply initially. At first, I found a lot of Latin music too hard to listen to.
B.E: Well, Dakar is a good place to have that experience, especially the Latin focus. That’s great, that’s beautiful. You have used this very interesting marketing strategy. Right from the beginning I was finding the CDs in places that don’t normally sell CDs – the stationery store, the clothing store. Talk about that, the things that worked and the things that didn’t work.
D.S: Well, you know, it’s so easy after 20 years to look back and say, “Oh, this has organically evolved,” and you know, it did, in retrospect. I look back and I say, there was a tendency at one moment in time in the music industry that people were so responsive to Putamayo that we accelerated the releases, and rushed, and then started signing artists, which was a whole different animal. And as I tell people, I feel like doing compilations is like dating, and signing artists is like getting married.
B.E: That’s about right.
D.S: I remember sitting there when Miriam Makeba was nominated for a Grammy and I
was flying her to New York and part of this McGilla event, and feeling like, “This is not my world. This is not really where I want to be. It’s not about Grammys. It’s about finding a way to compile music that is essentially an entrée to people to other cultures, in a positive way, showing a more positive side of their cultures, which I can do more effectively under the banner of Afro-Latin Party or Acoustic Africa than I can with Miriam Makeba. You know, I think we released four Oliver Mtukudzi albums – and the final thing was, I remember with our publicist getting Oliver onto the Letterman show, All Things Considered, and Fresh Air in the same week, and I couldn’t get the distributor to get enough CDs in the market, and I went to a show that Oliver did – and a separate show that Ricardo Lemvo did – both of them where the sound was just terrible. You know, the sound people just didn’t get African music, so I had to sit there and listen to it and it was just too painful for me, the combination of not being able to really market it in the same way and dealing with getting rained out or having sound quality issues.
B.E: And all the personalities and expectations.
D.S: And all the personalities—exactly! I remember it was one of those things I sat there and one of my regrets in life was just I was like at the Grammys for the first time in my life with Miriam Makeba, and I just—I don’t know why, I just thought they would vote for her. She had won the Grammy 35 years before and I didn’t know how to do a Grammy campaign, I’m not part of the Harvey Weinstein and the Oscar thing. And when she didn’t win, it was like, “Okay, what now?” And I remember sitting there and kind of going, “I don’t like any part of this process.” It’s not about awards. I mean, it is at some level great to receive recognition, but I felt like the heart and soul of what Putamayo does was to kind of be a curator, a compiler, and to take music around the world.
I’ve gone into the studio a few times to record tracks. Probably the track that’s won Putamayo the most revenue from a licensing perspective, from film and television, is a track that I went into the studio with Majeck Fashek, you know the wild man of Nigerian reggae. But I remember while we were recording having these arguments with him because he had this female singer that he wanted to do backup and she was off-key and she was obviously a friend of his and we would sit there and it’s like, “This doesn’t sound good.” And then we turned it down and it was a whole big process, a battle. Jacob loved that process, and that why he went on and developed his Cumbancha label. That was not my process. So, I think by trial and error going back and looking back, there was a lot of that trial and error.
B.E: But that Majeck Fashek track was successful, after all that pain? What was the song?
D.S: It was called, “Love and Affection.” It was actually on our Romantica CD, and it was a song I’d heard before. We’ve done this with artists like John Butte in New Orleans. He recorded a couple of tracks for different New Orleans projects. And we’ve done that with kids’ artists, where I’ve heard a song and said, “Oh, it’d be great if this person recorded it.” We’ve had probably 30 songs recorded, not always with me in the studio—often not—where I’ve just said, “I think this person would be good with this song,” or they said, “Why don’t I try recording this song?” And a lot of times, by having a fresh approach and hearing with objective ears, you can provide feedback. And so, I feel like as a listener for years you kind of get a sense for when something is special, when it misses. I enjoy that, but not at the level of putting out an artist album. So I reverted back to the basic core Putamayo thing of curating and compiling albums.
B.E: And Jacob launched Cumbancha, and you guys figured out how to work together.
D.S: Well, he came to me one day and said, “You know, I really feel it’s time for me to move on. I want to move to Vermont, I really want to start a label, mostly with the artists I’ve found through working at Putamayo,” and I said, “Well, you don’t have to give it up entirely. Why not consult with us?” which he’s done since he started the label. I mean, he keeps the archive up in Vermont, we’ve got 30 or 40,000 songs; he travels, you know, he’s done a couple of those boat trips to Africa.
B.E: Yeah, I was talking to him just last week actually when he was here with the Garifuna Collective.
D.S: So he does a lot of the research for international music. With the Internet now growing by leaps and bounds, it’s a lot easier to look for stuff now, and there are certain artists who I just intrinsically love and, since he’s been doing those trips, I’ve just spent the last couple of years listening to music that he brought back from his boat trips around Africa, and he’s always finding some great new people as you might imagine.
B.E: I still want to hear more about the distribution and marketing strategy. We’re living in a time now when the whole idea of records and CDs might be going away entirely. I mean, people say that; I don’t know if that’s true; it’s certainly changing dramatically. But when you were starting, it was the hey-day of the CD, and you were very skilled at getting CDs into places where people aren’t normally buying them. What was the history of that?
D.S: Well, I think having spent time designing clothing and handicrafts and importing crafts and selling them to boutiques around the country, it was very organic for me to go to that same group of 600 boutiques we were already selling to and say, “Hey, you’re buying our clothing and handicrafts. How about selling our music?” And I remember working with Rhino, and they were much more skittish. It took them nine months by the time they finally got the album out, and once the album came out and it was really successful for us, it wasn’t as successful in record retail, and they weren’t sure they wanted to continue. So it took us another nine months to get the next two albums out. I ran into someone in that New Hope, Lambertville trip last weekend who worked at a store, and the owner of the mall had the first Putamayo album and played it nonstop every day in the mall, and she got so sick of it. She couldn’t sell Putamayo anymore. So I think the idea of Putamayo was to select songs that were universally appealing. Lyrics didn’t really enter into it because most of it was in foreign languages, which helped in a certain way.
We tried to offer it as a music, culture, and travel package that can be given as a gift, and the idea was to focus first and foremost on what I would call gift stores. And then, as we started doing this, we started adding recipes to some of the CDs. We did Music from the Coffee Lands, and we said “Well, why not?” We almost partnered with Starbucks and decided not to do that, and sell directly to cafes and gourmet food stores and health food stores and so Coffee Lands helped us get started with a lot of those stores. And now, we have about 20 releases with recipes in them. So a part of it was, “Well, it was like mutually reinforcing.” Food and music are both intrinsic parts of most cultures so having a good regional recipe that people can cook dinner or have a drink and play the music, that’s part of the cultural experience.
So I felt like we were doing some additional cultural ambassadorship by doing that, and then also we started having photographs in Lonely Planet and others, and glossaries of the information and so I think then we started expanding into museum shops. Museums saw them as cultural packages. The Metropolitan Museum still sells a lot of the Putamayo CDs—several of them—and we try and tie it in so if they have an exhibit on, let’s say,
Picasso, they can have our España and Paris CDs. Or you know, when we did Gaugin, we had an album called South Pacific Islands, so, or when they did the Dead Sea Scrolls, we have albums called Israel and Arabic Groove So, sometimes there was this natural way that you’d try to marry the potential outlet for the music with the package—and, for 15 dollars, to be able to have great music and interesting liner notes and photography, that you could play over and over again; it’s really not a bad deal. Many of our new releases are starting to come out digitally, without the liner notes and the other stuff. I’m an old-school kind of guy and I think the quality is so much stronger on the CD versions and the package is much more of a compelling thing.
B.E: At the same time, we realize that the tide of history is against us. But I think CDs like yours will have a longer life than a lot because of what you’re talking about.
D.S: Well, I won’t say I’m stunned, but we still have a lot of retailers. Because Borders and a lot of retailers are closing, we’re actually doing better than in the past because there’s not that many outlets, and we have a following. So if we have a release like Vintage France or Women in Brazil that sounds good, it will sell well. I mean, we’ll have the physical album for a kind of more evolved package of stuff that people can buy, and then we’ll also offer the digital version for somebody who really just cares more about the music. And I won’t say it isn’t more challenging these days because you’re dealing with perception of the decline of the CD, but as I travel around the country, I think about how many people still prefer that vehicle. For me it just sounds so much better – I mean, the experience of me driving or playing music, you know, when you can play it with CD quality, it’s just a stronger experience. So a few dollars more to have the whole package seems worth it.
B.E: Some of my audiophile friends worry that a whole generation is being brought up unable to appreciate that distinction; they’re being dumbed-down in terms of their expectations of what music should sound like coming out of speakers. Something is being lost. It’s amazing to think because when I was in high school and college, the cool kids were spending fortunes on the best stereos to get every little grain of sound out of that vinyl. That mentality is totally archaic at this point.
D.S: Well, I think it’s funny, because I’m 61 now and I listen, I read books. I’m in the music business. And in a way, listening to music on iTunes just feels like work to me, whereas somehow—like I’m hopefully going to drive up to Vermont next week—I just think the ability to play music that just is part of the environment is more powerful. But coming back to marketing, we probably went too far in the sense of really trying to sell to so many different types of places.
B.E: What were some of the ones that didn’t work?
D.S: Over the last two months, I’ve been going through our database of thousands of stores, many still active, and saying, “We’ve gone too far in the other way; we’ve opened too many accounts.” People say to us, “We see you everywhere,” and so it has actually been in a way a certain restraining thing for accounts who feel like they’d love to carry Putamayo but, you know, you’re in three stores on my block, and none of those stores are necessarily selling it that well, so we’ve gone through this weeding-out process now.
B.E: Is there any sort of pattern that emerges?
D.S: Absolutely. We thought, and it seemed natural when we put out Coffee Lands, that cafes would be a really good outlet for Putamayo. We opened hundreds of cafes. It’s a fast
kind of pace, you’re buying a cup of coffee, it’s not really a music base. Yes, Starbucks sells music, but I’m sure they’re being affected also by the—
B.E: Yeah, I don’t know how successful that’s been for them either.
D.S: But I think the idea is that, you know, when I go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or when I was in New Hope and I saw the stores like Whole Foods, and there was a fair-trade store too in Princeton that sells Putamayo, and then there was an upscale gift store that imports stuff. I think it has to fit naturally. The people who work there have to enjoy the music, the customers that walk in have to feel like in a way it fits, and that we make good selections with them, which kind of is something else that I’ve had to recognize is that, and a lot of the retailers are wed, like “Oh, you got rid of Mali to Memphis! I love that album!” But it’s been out for fifteen years and it never sold tons, and it’s been declining and just after a while you just have to weed the garden. How many Brazilian albums can a store sell? How many African albums can a store that’s not a record store sell? And so the basic idea is that we’ve been kind of phasing out titles and we’ve also been redoing some of the tiltes. We just redid World Reggae and we’ve added some new tracks; that just came out this week. And we redid the African Beat album.
You know, when we first released these albums, I was rushing, and whenever you rush, you sacrifice. When it came time, I just didn’t think the albums were ready, I wasn’t proud of them. So I felt like I wanted to use this as a chance to redo them. So part of the 20th anniversary year is going to be re-releasing albums with new tracks that we’ve found.
I was very happy with the way Arabic Beat came out and I think eventually, even though I love Arabic Groove, eventually we’re going to have to phase some of these albums out that have been around for a long time. So I feel like it’s part of the process as well is just identifying the right retailers, finding out which albums really stand the test of time and are worth continuing with, and developing new projects that are appealing enough, fun to put together, but also offer the kind of music experience you know people are going to really enjoy, and taking deliberate time to both research, feel like you’ve done – I don’t want to call it due diligence – but you’ve really done the right research because there’s so much music; you can’t ever feel like you’ve listened to every track that could potentially work, it’s just endless. You feel like you’ve done a good job. No actor is going to be 100% thrilled with every performance – or any performance – they do. Nobody putting together an album is going to always feel 100%--but I can tell when an album really clicks, and that’s really what I’m looking for. And I feel like through the years I’ve gotten better at identifying that experience..
B.E: You talked about some of the big success. What about for you personally, what’s your shortlist of favorite releases that you still love to listen to, that you still get a charge out of?
D.S: Well, it’s funny. Some of the albums I’ll mention are no longer actively sold. If you remember, I went to Cape Verde on the Afropop trip. Partly the idea was that I was going to be releasing an album called Cape Verde and I said, “Oh, it’ll be great to go there!” and there wasn’t that much music being created or recorded by Cape Verdeans in Cape Verde.
B.E: It was all happening in Lisbon.
D.S: Paris, and Lisbon, and Boston. But this blend of African and Portuguese sound was so beautiful, so I felt when I worked on Cape Verde, the hard part was eliminating songs; there were too many options. Which Cesaria Evora track? I mean, there were so many great songs. With African, Brazilian, and Cuban music particularly, the hardest part is often which tracks to use and which to cut. You can’t include it all. So when we released Cuba, we said, “Okay, let’s come back with Café Cubano” which is more of a mellower album, it’ll have recipes, it’ll have a café vibe, I think it worked out well for that purpose. I would say historically it’s that blend of African music with Brazilian, Latin, and I would also emphasize that there’s something about – Santana actually said it – the guajira and the more campesino Cuban, rustic, rootsy sounds. A lot of people who really responded well to Buena Vista Social Club when it first came out, responded well to Cesaria Evora, responded well to Bebel Gilberto—all of these artists are people who have music that fits that kind of description: it’s beautiful, it’s lyrical, it’s melodic, it’s well-recorded, they’re good songs.
So I feel like I’m not that dissimilar. Maybe my palate, my taste, is very similar to the world in the sense that I really think people appreciate great African, Brazilian, Latin music. And I will say this: since I’ve moved to New Orleans almost 10 years ago, I’ve become a huge fan of American roots music, so I’d be remiss to not talk about how we’ve released a number of American roots music that essentially… I think Mali to Memphis may have been the first showing a connection between Africa and the American roots music, but then we went on to release albums like Mississippi Blues, American Blues, New Orleans, Zydeco, and recently Jazz and—I think that’s another thing, we show with jazz around the world. And the children’s series has evolved very much in a similar way, for a fun, educational way to introduce children to other cultures.
B.E: And does the childrens’ material do well?
D.S: Yeah. In fact, that’s been a great focus, partly since I had a son. I remember when you
did the NPR review of the first World Playground for All Things Considered. It was interesting. You played this little snippet…
B.E: Manu Chao.
D.S: Yes, itt was Manu Chao’s “Bongo Bong.” And a couple people called me after that ran and they said, “Who is that? What is that?” And I remember running into people who said they pulled over to the side of the road and said, “Oh my god, that’s great, I’ve got to get it” and…
B.E: Not many people knew who he was then.
D.S: Very few people did. It was an early hit in France, and I think that was a perfect example—and NPR has done an incredible job introducing new sounds to people.
[caption id="attachment_12326" align="aligncenter" width="595"]
Dan Storper in New York (Eyre 2013)[/caption]
B.E: And their music website is unbelievable.
D.S: Yeah. There’s something about, especially because NPR is one of the few places where you can hear it, someone hearing that song in that moment on a nationally syndicated radio news show, made all the difference. And you know, Oliver Mtukudzi has been featured—hhe was on the Letterman show, Habib was on the Letterman show—but there was more impact from a good NPR feature than from Letterman. You know, we’ve had four artists on the Today show. We’ve sold more albums simply because somebody heard a snippet of a song or someone said some good stuff about a Putamayo album on NPR.
B.E: I wonder if that’s still true. I think the media environment gets more confused day by day, but it’s interesting.
D.S: Well, I think it’s all relative. Oliver kind of nailed it on the Letterman show, Habib seemed nervous, and his song was not as powerful as Oliver’s and they wouldn’t let us play “Wasiye,” because he had a new album out and they wanted to showcse. I just feel like if Habib played “Wasiye” on national television it would have been kickass, it would have been the killer thing.
B.E: Letterman insisted on a song from the new album?
D.S: Yeah. He wanted to hold it up. I think part of the idea is what they’re doing is relevant, so we picked the best song from the new album, which is a good song, but it wasn’t “Wasiye.” And you know, David Letterman—that’s a perfect example. I dated Dave Letterman’s booker for 3 months. We were good friends, wonderful lady. She’s still there. But whether she didn’t want to try she couldn’t, I couldn’t get arrested trying to get Oliver or Habib onto the Letterman show. One day, Dave Letterman was going to the same acupuncturist as I went to, a South African guy, and I had given him Oliver’s CD, and Dave said, “I love this African music you’re turning me onto. Anybody else?” And he gave him the CD that I gave the acupuncturist, and Letterman freaked out, called him the next day, “Who is this? I gotta get him.” and I started getting calls from the girl that I had dated saying, “When can you get Oliver on the show?” So, it’s the funniest thing how just one song can somehow make its way. That’s what that Manu Chao thing did on NPR.
B.E: It’s like Bonnie Raitt turning onto Oliver’s song “Hear Me Lord.” That triggered a whole string of interesting events, leading to her coming to Mali with us!
D.S: I gave her Habib’s album, and she said, “You know, I love African music,” but she didn’t really know Habib. And so I gave her the album and she went like six months later, three months later, she went to Mali to hang out with him.
B.E: In between those events, that there was that WOMAD festival in Seattle where Oliver and Habib both played. I had been in Zimbabwe and I was at the house of Oliver’s manager, and she said, “Oh, check this out. On Bonnie Raitt’s next record she’s going to do this version of an Oliver song,” and she told me the story. So when I got home, I called her label and tried to get Bonnie on the phone for an interview and that interview was really life-changing because she was… Well, it was just very unusual when you interview someone at that level and they’re asking you questions like, “How do you find out about stuff?” and “I think what you’re doing is really interesting” and we kind of became friends from there, and that was what led to that Mali trip. Like you say, it’s just one little spark, that one song, that gets the ball rolling.
D.S: When you look back, you don’t always remember things 100% clearly, and you know, I joked with Jacob about the Cape Verde album because I heard all this great music in Cape Verde and I think just one song made it onto the album dfrom the trip. But from Senegal, because of the interest in just that Afro-Latin music that was playing in this little club, I started, releasing a series of Afro-Latin albums: Congo to Cuba, Afro-Latin Party, Afro-Latino. All of these that really show that connection. I’ve had some highlights and musical experiences, but the first night in that club in Dakar was one of the top ten musical experiences I’ve ever had.
B.E: That’s great. Let’s just talk for a little bit about the future. Twenty years. Where do you see things going from here?
D.S: I’m still a believer. I’m not one of the people that thinks the CD is going to disappear, and when I look at the sales of a number of our titles, I’m still stunned that you can sell those kinds of numbers – and you know, obviously, there’s the digital side too.
B.E: What kind of numbers are we talking about? What’s a big sale for one of your compilations?
D.S: I mean, it’s not like it was in the early years. We’ve had three or four albums that have sold over half-a-million copies over time, but I would say, you know, here are two good examples of successful albums. My wife started practicing yoga and we released an album called Yoga and then an album called World Yoga and they’ve sold really well. I think the first one is closing in on a hundred thousand copies and it’s only been out for about a year and a half, two years. You know if I look at Paris or some of the other albums that have come out, Brazilian Café , these albums that came out after the economic recession of 2008 began and digital downloading really took off, have done well. We have several albums that have sold over a-hundred thousand copies.
B.E: That’s fantastic.
D.S: You know, it’s a different model. Part of working with the retailers that understand and get Putamayo is that there was this moment where there was a proliferation of music and a proliferation of accounts. We want to continue working with specialty retailers and bookstores and museums, so one of the things we did was hire a woman who specializes in selling to bookstores and museums, rather than trying to train everybody. So it’s both continue to try and develop the marketing side, develop the kids’ business—kids and education business—so, a lot of the schools and school systems use our music as part of educational curriculum. We’ve developed these activity guides too.
B.E: These are young kids, right?
D.S: Yeah, typically 4 to 7, 4 to 8. So there are lullaby albums that are used to put their kids to sleep. Dreamland is one of the ones that, you know, is closing in on probably 400,000 copies sold, and we’ve released six other Dreamland titles, so in addition to the Playground series that started with the World Playground we talked about, there have been a number of others including, last month, American Playground. And then coloring books, sticker collections for kids, calendars. We did our first photography calendar last year featuring photographs from a pretty well-known photographer Jonathan Kaplan shooting kids all over the world, and it was successful, so we’re repeating that, and we’re expanding into cultural multimedia products. I’ve always tried to do books, never yet successfuly. So that is one of the goals that I have. You know, and when music fits, you want to keep it a part of it, but not be 100% dependent on music per se. You know, the ability to update the earlier albums has given me a fresh look, and sometimes I’ll think, “Holy catfish, what was I thinking?” when I listen back to a song and say, “This was a great album except these two songs,” and now I can get rid of them and add a couple of fresher, new songs to it. So next year we’re hoping to re-issue Women of Africa and Acoustic Africa as updated versions.
B.E: Nice. That’s great. Well, Congratulations, Dan. I admire and appreciate what you’ve done.
D.S: And congratulations to you on 25 years as well.
