And Now For Something Completely Different...
(I sent this piece, in slightly different form, to two esteemed publications that politely rejected it.)
A few years ago, when I lived in San Francisco and had a little too much time on hands, I started researching a book about Windham Hill Records. I dropped about a hundred bucks on about a hundred New Age albums; I spent hours interviewing George Winston over the phone and in person (he’s a talker); I photocopied and highlighted dozens of articles. I tracked down relatively obscure Windham Hill artists like Scott Cossu, a pianist who was struck by a car in 1989 and nearly died from a severe head injury. He endured multiple brain operations and a facial reconstruction; he struggled for years to relearn how to do everyday tasks and play piano again. Listening to him tell his story, I wished I liked his music.
That’s the problem, of course. As a business and as a collection of personalities, Windham Hill was, to my mind, a singularly entertaining rags-to-riches-to-rags drama. But I had to contend with the problem that most of the music sucked. For most of the 1980s Windham Hill released a stream of popular albums that mostly ranged in quality from mediocre to godawful. The story was much the same in the 90s, though the records weren’t so popular by then; America’s New Age moment had come and gone. In this decade, with New Age music accounting for about one percent of total record sales in the U.S., the label’s just a subset of a subset of the BMG empire; with the notable exceptions of Winston and Jim Brickman, a jingle writer turned romantic-dinner-music titan, the label is pretty much content to repackage its back catalog as one-disc samplers targeting the Pilates crowd. So A Quiet Revolution, a four-CD retrospective box set commemorating Windham Hill’s 30th anniversary, is a surprisingly frisky move—-a public claim to relevance that it hasn’t had the nerve to make for years.
“[Windham Hill] was as much a lifestyle as music,” says a bit of promo patter for the set, and the reason for the label’s aesthetic failure is in that statement—-by the mid-80s it had begun to coddle the fan base that used its music as the aural equivalent of aromatherapy candles. But the people who ran and recorded for the label in its earliest days would have bristled at the notion they were making, as one wag put it, “a little Nytol music”-—they were running a serious shop dedicated to honoring a respectable tradition in American folk. Had it stuck with its original mission, it probably wouldn’t have become a multimillion-dollar business. But it also wouldn’t have been a laughingstock. Indeed, people would have called it influential; if you can dig out the right records in the bargain bins, you still can.
The label had modest origins: it was founded by Will Ackerman and his then-wife, Anne Robinson, to release exactly one record, Ackerman’s In Search of the Turtle’s Navel, a collection of acoustic guitar solos. Windham Hill more or less minded its own business for five years, selling its records out of health food stores and through the mail until 1981, when pianist George Winston’s Autumn became a surprise hit with jazz listeners. Autumn’s success brought an infusion of much-needed cash into the Palo Alto, California, offices of the label, and one of the first things Ackerman and Robinson did with the money was create a spinoff label, Lost Lake Arts.
Turtle’s Navel sounds like John Fahey with the edges sanded off; Autumn is Keith Jarrett without his infamous distemper. (And Ackerman readily cops to using the label Jarrett recorded for, ECM, as inspiration for Windham Hill covers.) But the sound of the Lost Lake albums dovetails surprisingly well with the wooly free-folk sensibility of today’s New Weird Americans. Guitarist Robbie Basho, who recorded for Fahey’s Takoma label in the 60s, came out of semi-retirement to record a Lost Lake disc, Art of the Acoustic Steel String Guitar 6 & 12, and an album for Windham Hill, Visions of the Country, which reflect his obsessions with Middle Eastern, Indian, and classical music; Ballads and Blues 1972, a reissue of George Winston’s first album (which came out on Takoma), is filled with propulsive blues, ragtime, and stride piano playing that he’s avoided ever since. Winston lobbied to reissue Ocean, an album of fuzzy, drifting nylon-string guitar meditations by Brazilian-born guitarist and onetime Dizzy Gillespie sideman Bola Sete. Ackerman’s cousin Alex de Grassi, a huge fan of U.K. jazz-folk groups like the Incredible String Band and Pentangle, agitated for a reissue of Pentangle guitarist John Renbourn’s 1968 solo album Sir John Alot Of Merrye Englandes Musyk Thyng and Ye Grene Knythe, an assortment of ballads and madrigals that’s a direct forefather to the likes of Six Organs of Admittance and Espers.
Those elements are there in a few of the early Windham Hill records too. De Grassi’s technique on his 1978 debut, Turning: Turning Back, is just as elegant and muscular as Renbourn's; obscurities like Daniel Hecht’s Willow and David Qualey’s Soliloquy are fine excursions into mannered but broad-minded acoustic folk that any Harris Newman fan could get behind. And on his best days Ackerman could come up with a speedy, gorgeous fingerpicking showcase like “Seattle.”
So what happened? To perhaps oversimplify, Shadowfax happened. First appearing on Windham Hill as a backup band on one of de Grassi’s albums, Shadowfax played snoozy fuzak that reflected Ackerman’s interest in making Windham Hill less of an acoustic folk label and more of a home for ensemble playing, where musicians guested on one another’s albums and appeared together on the label’s enormously popular samplers. (The sound boomers conjure up in their heads when they think of Windham Hill probably isn’t Winston so much as Michael Manring, a fretless electric bassist who played on many of the label’s mid-80s albums--almost always making them worse. His tone was expansive and goopy filler, the musical equivalent of foam insulation.)
But if the ensemble approach wrecked Windham Hill’s sound, it also made it consistent—-and more packageable. Arrange articles about Windham Hill chronologically and the label’s story shifts from music glossies to the business pages. Jazz magazines took Windham Hill releases seriously in the early 80s, and Rolling Stone crowned Autumn with a four-star review in 1981. (Kurt Loder, an early booster, had nice things to say about its follow up, December.) But by 1985, when there were Windham Hill sections in record stores, Ackerman couldn’t avoid the fact that he’d accidentally invented a genre. Windham Hill signed a distribution and marketing deal with A&M records that year, becoming a $40-million-a-year business. Other major labels took that as a cue to jump into the New Age game as well, building stables out of Windham Hill’s most successful (not best) parts: lotsa mid-tempo keyboards, some Manring-esque caulk, a few nods to “foreign” musical traditions. From there it’s an easy trip to musical hell, which you and I know as Yanni: Live at the Acropolis.
In truth nobody with ears can reasonably connect Winston--a close friend of John Fahey who was obsessed with Professor Longhair, Fats Waller, and Vince Guaraldi--with Yanni, who started his career playing keyboards in a Minneapolis synth-pop band. But making that connection made good financial sense for Windham Hill; when it bought Private Music in 1997 it inherited the rights to Yanni’s back catalog and has since released three compilations of his music. There’s no Yanni on A Quiet Revolution, but the set is more a reflection of its New Age business plan than its acoustic folk roots. Only one song on the set predates 1980; none of the acoustic work by Qualey, Hecht, or de Grassi from that era appears. Box sets are easily compromised by licensing hassles and disagreeable artists, but even with that qualifier, the set’s a mess. Its first three discs are broken out into meaningless themes—-Elements, Peace, Artistry—-that showcase lesser lights such as Nightnoise, Liz Story, and Manring. The fourth disc, Excursions, reveals just how confused the label became in its third decade. With New Age clearly a dying yuppie fad, Windham Hill was flailing for ways to get an audience. What was the Windham Hill brand name worth? Would listeners like aging topical folkies like Janis Ian? A world music artist like Cesaria Evora? Singer-songwriters like Patty Larkin and John Gorka? A scat version of Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time,” anyone? Anyone?
That’s a story, I suppose. But it’s not a tale, and the deeper I fell into Windham Hill the more my enthusiasm waned—-the initial excitement of a group of musicians inventing a small but relevant byway in American folk devolved fairly quickly, stripping my interest off along with it. (For the record, I had a stunningly patient and supportive agent who helped generate a few lengthy phone calls with interested editors, resulting in a bite from one publisher. But by that point I couldn't see myself finishing the project; I had neither the time, energy, or resources in pursuing a book that, if done wrong, would be a complete rep-killer.) I tried thinking about Windham Hill from different angles—-a reflection of America’s spiritual individualism, perhaps maybe something about the New Age business in general. But no rhetorical or organizational gambit was going to let me get around the fact that the label simply wasn't interesting by the 90s—-it didn’t represent anything except a label that sacrificed its aesthetic impulses for the sake of building a brand. (Even a fine acoustic guitarist like Michael Hedges, who’d surely be wowing ‘em at Bonnaroo if he hadn’t died in 1997, had fallen off his game in his later years.) Its back catalog isn’t so toxic that it couldn’t make for a solid two-, maybe even three-disc set of the good stuff, if an enterprising label wanted to pursue the idea. But that label isn’t Windham Hill.
A few years ago, when I lived in San Francisco and had a little too much time on hands, I started researching a book about Windham Hill Records. I dropped about a hundred bucks on about a hundred New Age albums; I spent hours interviewing George Winston over the phone and in person (he’s a talker); I photocopied and highlighted dozens of articles. I tracked down relatively obscure Windham Hill artists like Scott Cossu, a pianist who was struck by a car in 1989 and nearly died from a severe head injury. He endured multiple brain operations and a facial reconstruction; he struggled for years to relearn how to do everyday tasks and play piano again. Listening to him tell his story, I wished I liked his music.
That’s the problem, of course. As a business and as a collection of personalities, Windham Hill was, to my mind, a singularly entertaining rags-to-riches-to-rags drama. But I had to contend with the problem that most of the music sucked. For most of the 1980s Windham Hill released a stream of popular albums that mostly ranged in quality from mediocre to godawful. The story was much the same in the 90s, though the records weren’t so popular by then; America’s New Age moment had come and gone. In this decade, with New Age music accounting for about one percent of total record sales in the U.S., the label’s just a subset of a subset of the BMG empire; with the notable exceptions of Winston and Jim Brickman, a jingle writer turned romantic-dinner-music titan, the label is pretty much content to repackage its back catalog as one-disc samplers targeting the Pilates crowd. So A Quiet Revolution, a four-CD retrospective box set commemorating Windham Hill’s 30th anniversary, is a surprisingly frisky move—-a public claim to relevance that it hasn’t had the nerve to make for years.
“[Windham Hill] was as much a lifestyle as music,” says a bit of promo patter for the set, and the reason for the label’s aesthetic failure is in that statement—-by the mid-80s it had begun to coddle the fan base that used its music as the aural equivalent of aromatherapy candles. But the people who ran and recorded for the label in its earliest days would have bristled at the notion they were making, as one wag put it, “a little Nytol music”-—they were running a serious shop dedicated to honoring a respectable tradition in American folk. Had it stuck with its original mission, it probably wouldn’t have become a multimillion-dollar business. But it also wouldn’t have been a laughingstock. Indeed, people would have called it influential; if you can dig out the right records in the bargain bins, you still can.
The label had modest origins: it was founded by Will Ackerman and his then-wife, Anne Robinson, to release exactly one record, Ackerman’s In Search of the Turtle’s Navel, a collection of acoustic guitar solos. Windham Hill more or less minded its own business for five years, selling its records out of health food stores and through the mail until 1981, when pianist George Winston’s Autumn became a surprise hit with jazz listeners. Autumn’s success brought an infusion of much-needed cash into the Palo Alto, California, offices of the label, and one of the first things Ackerman and Robinson did with the money was create a spinoff label, Lost Lake Arts.
Turtle’s Navel sounds like John Fahey with the edges sanded off; Autumn is Keith Jarrett without his infamous distemper. (And Ackerman readily cops to using the label Jarrett recorded for, ECM, as inspiration for Windham Hill covers.) But the sound of the Lost Lake albums dovetails surprisingly well with the wooly free-folk sensibility of today’s New Weird Americans. Guitarist Robbie Basho, who recorded for Fahey’s Takoma label in the 60s, came out of semi-retirement to record a Lost Lake disc, Art of the Acoustic Steel String Guitar 6 & 12, and an album for Windham Hill, Visions of the Country, which reflect his obsessions with Middle Eastern, Indian, and classical music; Ballads and Blues 1972, a reissue of George Winston’s first album (which came out on Takoma), is filled with propulsive blues, ragtime, and stride piano playing that he’s avoided ever since. Winston lobbied to reissue Ocean, an album of fuzzy, drifting nylon-string guitar meditations by Brazilian-born guitarist and onetime Dizzy Gillespie sideman Bola Sete. Ackerman’s cousin Alex de Grassi, a huge fan of U.K. jazz-folk groups like the Incredible String Band and Pentangle, agitated for a reissue of Pentangle guitarist John Renbourn’s 1968 solo album Sir John Alot Of Merrye Englandes Musyk Thyng and Ye Grene Knythe, an assortment of ballads and madrigals that’s a direct forefather to the likes of Six Organs of Admittance and Espers.
Those elements are there in a few of the early Windham Hill records too. De Grassi’s technique on his 1978 debut, Turning: Turning Back, is just as elegant and muscular as Renbourn's; obscurities like Daniel Hecht’s Willow and David Qualey’s Soliloquy are fine excursions into mannered but broad-minded acoustic folk that any Harris Newman fan could get behind. And on his best days Ackerman could come up with a speedy, gorgeous fingerpicking showcase like “Seattle.”
So what happened? To perhaps oversimplify, Shadowfax happened. First appearing on Windham Hill as a backup band on one of de Grassi’s albums, Shadowfax played snoozy fuzak that reflected Ackerman’s interest in making Windham Hill less of an acoustic folk label and more of a home for ensemble playing, where musicians guested on one another’s albums and appeared together on the label’s enormously popular samplers. (The sound boomers conjure up in their heads when they think of Windham Hill probably isn’t Winston so much as Michael Manring, a fretless electric bassist who played on many of the label’s mid-80s albums--almost always making them worse. His tone was expansive and goopy filler, the musical equivalent of foam insulation.)
But if the ensemble approach wrecked Windham Hill’s sound, it also made it consistent—-and more packageable. Arrange articles about Windham Hill chronologically and the label’s story shifts from music glossies to the business pages. Jazz magazines took Windham Hill releases seriously in the early 80s, and Rolling Stone crowned Autumn with a four-star review in 1981. (Kurt Loder, an early booster, had nice things to say about its follow up, December.) But by 1985, when there were Windham Hill sections in record stores, Ackerman couldn’t avoid the fact that he’d accidentally invented a genre. Windham Hill signed a distribution and marketing deal with A&M records that year, becoming a $40-million-a-year business. Other major labels took that as a cue to jump into the New Age game as well, building stables out of Windham Hill’s most successful (not best) parts: lotsa mid-tempo keyboards, some Manring-esque caulk, a few nods to “foreign” musical traditions. From there it’s an easy trip to musical hell, which you and I know as Yanni: Live at the Acropolis.
In truth nobody with ears can reasonably connect Winston--a close friend of John Fahey who was obsessed with Professor Longhair, Fats Waller, and Vince Guaraldi--with Yanni, who started his career playing keyboards in a Minneapolis synth-pop band. But making that connection made good financial sense for Windham Hill; when it bought Private Music in 1997 it inherited the rights to Yanni’s back catalog and has since released three compilations of his music. There’s no Yanni on A Quiet Revolution, but the set is more a reflection of its New Age business plan than its acoustic folk roots. Only one song on the set predates 1980; none of the acoustic work by Qualey, Hecht, or de Grassi from that era appears. Box sets are easily compromised by licensing hassles and disagreeable artists, but even with that qualifier, the set’s a mess. Its first three discs are broken out into meaningless themes—-Elements, Peace, Artistry—-that showcase lesser lights such as Nightnoise, Liz Story, and Manring. The fourth disc, Excursions, reveals just how confused the label became in its third decade. With New Age clearly a dying yuppie fad, Windham Hill was flailing for ways to get an audience. What was the Windham Hill brand name worth? Would listeners like aging topical folkies like Janis Ian? A world music artist like Cesaria Evora? Singer-songwriters like Patty Larkin and John Gorka? A scat version of Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time,” anyone? Anyone?
That’s a story, I suppose. But it’s not a tale, and the deeper I fell into Windham Hill the more my enthusiasm waned—-the initial excitement of a group of musicians inventing a small but relevant byway in American folk devolved fairly quickly, stripping my interest off along with it. (For the record, I had a stunningly patient and supportive agent who helped generate a few lengthy phone calls with interested editors, resulting in a bite from one publisher. But by that point I couldn't see myself finishing the project; I had neither the time, energy, or resources in pursuing a book that, if done wrong, would be a complete rep-killer.) I tried thinking about Windham Hill from different angles—-a reflection of America’s spiritual individualism, perhaps maybe something about the New Age business in general. But no rhetorical or organizational gambit was going to let me get around the fact that the label simply wasn't interesting by the 90s—-it didn’t represent anything except a label that sacrificed its aesthetic impulses for the sake of building a brand. (Even a fine acoustic guitarist like Michael Hedges, who’d surely be wowing ‘em at Bonnaroo if he hadn’t died in 1997, had fallen off his game in his later years.) Its back catalog isn’t so toxic that it couldn’t make for a solid two-, maybe even three-disc set of the good stuff, if an enterprising label wanted to pursue the idea. But that label isn’t Windham Hill.
1 Comments:
Just came across your post in a search for Anne Robinson, for whom I did a writing job in 1991, a WH company description she used as her central selling document in her negotiations with BMG.
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