The term “world music” is a curious designation since, other than the sounds of Yma Sumac and Juan Garcia Esquivel, most music we encounter comes from somewhere in the world. Dan Storper, founder of the Putumayo World Music label and part-time renovator of a Faubourg Marigny home, offers a somewhat precise definition: “Few people know that the term really started as a marketing term in the late-’80s by a group of British label executives that came up with it at a dinner in London. It’s not like there’s a genre called ‘world music’ really. There’s so many different genres. I’ll use ‘world music’ just because it’s a simpler way of referring to music from other places, but as you well know, you’ll find Cajun and zydeco and Native American music in world music sections. I think the idea, to some extent, is that it’s music that has evolved out of the African Diaspora or tribal backgrounds versus folk music, which has a tendency to be coming out of an Anglo, white European tradition.
“It’s funny—Putumayo was never intended to be a new label. It was never really intended to be more than just a small series of world music collections. It really started just because I had been traveling and always would hear music from around the world. After my business had grown in the ’70s and ’80s and I had clothing and handicrafts retail stores called Putumayo, I would play records from the Andean mountains to help create an environment. It felt like you were escaping the streets of New York.
“Over the years as I opened more stores and got involved in designing clothes and handicrafts, I lost track of the music. Back in 1991, I was coming back from Indonesia and stopped in San Francisco. I was walking to see an Indonesian art exhibit at the de Young Museum. I was walking through the park on this beautiful day and I saw a group of a few hundred people, dancing and having a good time, listening to the group Kotoja. The finale was the song “Sawalé,” which opens up Putumayo’s 10th anniversary collection. I was struck by how the music had really brought these people together. I remember seeing a Chinese woman dancing with an African man, almost dancing salsa to this Nigerian juju-based music. Everyone was dancing in their own styles. It just seemed like a very magic moment. I loved the music.
“When I got back to New York, I walked into one of my stores and they were playing this thrash-y metal music. I was annoyed and I said, ‘This is inappropriate.’ I realized that I hadn’t paid much attention to the music in my stores. I went to record stores and I was shocked, in the early’ 90s, that there was no way to listen to the music in the bins. I couldn’t figure out what to buy.
“A friend of mine, at the time, worked with a company that created in-store tapes so I committed to doing a couple of tapes with them where I would select the music. I would mix Bob Dylan with Sergio Mendes, Van Morrison, Bonnie Raitt and people like that. The first tape came to the stores at the end of ’91 and I remember getting a call from one of the store managers after the tape had been in the store for a few hours and she said, ‘Dan, you don’t understand what’s going on. It’s crazy.’ My employees were all bopping around, in a so much better mood than they were in before. Every couple of minutes, someone would come up to the counter, asking about a specific song.
“It wasn’t just the world music songs but it was also people asking about songs by Van Morrison or Bonnie Raitt that they hadn’t heard, songs that were not radio-friendly. It was clear that there was a disconnect between what people liked and what was easily available to them. I belonged to a group called the Social Venture Network—a nonprofit organization with people like Ben & Jerry’s and the Body Shop—and I was friends with a guy named Richard Foos, the founder and president of Rhino Records. I proposed the idea of a world music compilation to him and he agreed pretty quickly. I picked the music, did the sequencing and Rhino did the licensing and manufacturing. The first two albums came out in April of ’93. We did two more with Rhino and they assessed it and said, ‘Look, we don’t really want to continue.’
“I wanted to continue—I was into it, it was working well in the non-traditional market so we took over the licensing, manufacturing and distribution. That’s how we’ve been doing it ever since.
“At the very start, because of my background selling clothes and handicrafts to gift stores and clothing stores, it seemed very obvious that those are places where they need to play music and the idea was that people could hear the music and right there, they could buy a package that takes them on a journey.
“Although I did the first five years pretty much on my own, Jacob Edgar, our ethnomusicologist, really does a lot of the preliminary research and writes most of the liner notes. Part of the idea is to connect music with travel and culture and to present an introduction. That’s been really rewarding because that’s the whole idea of what I wanted to do when I first began my business in the mid-’70s—travel the world and present interesting products that other cultures create and present a more positive view of those cultures than what you see in the news, which is mostly about war and AIDS and poverty and drugs. It seems like people tend to miss out on the concept that many traditional, international cultures have very rich dance, music, art, food, film and other types of cultural riches that tend not to be seen because they’re not part of mainstream culture.
“We’re all impacted by music which moves us and makes us feel good. Putumayo has a slogan: Guaranteed to make you feel good. We actually have a guarantee we offer people which is if for any reason they don’t love a CD, they can return it to us. We give them a full refund.”
As a devotee of Putumayo products, this writer doubts that Dan ever has to honor his refund policy. The best early Christmas present I received was Putumayo’s latest, French Café, starring Brigitte Bardot, Serge Gainsbourg, Jane Birkin and Georges Brassens. Finer mood music for dining on escargots à la Bourguignonne and sipping Pinot Noir has not been invented. Joyeux Noel!
