New Albion's demise leaves cultural gap MUSIC

LABELS30SD1-17JUN02-DD-BW--Albion Records head honchos Foster Reed, left, and Tom Welsh (no longer with label in 2012) in their modest offices near 3rd Street in San Francisco. By Brant Ward/Chronicle LABELS30SD1-17JUN02-DD-BW--Albion Records head honchos Foster Reed, left, and Tom Welsh (no longer with label in 2012) in their modest offices near 3rd Street in San Francisco. By Brant Ward/Chronicle Photo: Brant Ward, SFC Photo: Brant Ward, SFC Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close New Albion's demise leaves cultural gap 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

For nearly a quarter of a century, devotees of a particular strain of contemporary music - experimental, contemplative, drawing on the traditions of John Cage and American minimalism - have counted on the small Bay Area record label New Albion to supply their needs. Under the visionary, willful leadership of founder Foster Reed, the company found a small but distinctive niche in the new music market and made a number of recordings that live on as indispensable documents.

There was just one catch: the money. It wasn't there.

Last month, Reed, 61, finally decided to pull the plug on his operation. Visitors to the company's website now encounter a mournful black background with a personal note from Reed, directing customers to a website where the company's stock is still available for digital downloads. But the physical CDs are going back to the artists, and there won't be any new records in the pipeline.

"More people than ever were still listening to the music, so that's good," Reed said recently from his home in Tivoli, N.Y., where he moved a decade ago. "But there was no way for me to be connected to that economically, so that was bad."

For observers who were paying attention, the demise of New Albion doesn't come as a huge surprise. Reed hadn't released a new CD since 2008, when Berkeley pianist Sarah Cahill recorded a beautiful collection of music by the early American modernist Leo Ornstein. And he'd been complaining about the label's unworkable business model - or rather, the inhospitableness of the marketplace to his kind of boutique operation - for much longer than that.

Personalized vision

Still, the loss of New Albion leaves a palpable absence in our musical culture, as well as pointing up the weaknesses in the current economic model for recorded music. There are superficially comparable operations still around, including the Tzaddik and Cantaloupe labels, but none that boasts quite the inimitable flavor that New Albion did.

The reason for that is simple. New Albion was the expression of a single aesthetic taste and a single, highly personalized vision. Reed didn't do everything himself - for a number of years he worked in a complementary partnership with Thomas Welsh, now the associate music director for the Cleveland Museum of Art - but he put his personal stamp on everything the label produced. He didn't do focus groups, and he didn't look at marketing trends. If he found the music rewarding, exciting or innovative, the record got made.

That's probably why the financial end of the operation was always such a struggle. But it also meant that the New Albion imprimatur stood for something. A given release might not have been to your taste, but you knew that it was at least to Reed's, and that it had been made with complete integrity of purpose.

During the label's heyday - in the 1990s Reed was releasing something like a dozen records a year - it staked out turf in several key areas of the contemporary repertoire.

Important legacy

Perhaps the label's most important legacy is the 1990 recording of Morton Feldman's hushed choral masterpiece "Rothko Chapel," performed by the UC Berkeley Chorus under the late Philip Brett. But the catalog ranged far and wide - from the early Renaissance offerings of the Ensemble Project Ars Nova to the music of such Bay Area figures as John Adams, Ingram Marshall and Lou Harrison.

Reed says he saw the writing on the wall after he released the last batch of CDs, which included discs of music by Kyle Gann, Roberto Sierra and Stephen Scott.

"These were people of renown, or people who were up and coming, and none of them sold at all. And at a certain point it seemed like an existential act to be making records and throwing them out the window, if there was no market to sell them into."

New Albion was the victim of a number of developments, including the death of independent retail outlets - "We never belonged in Best Buy," Reed says - and the rise of digital downloads.

"Ninety-nine cents a track is fine for pop music that sells hundreds of thousands of copies. But to sell a 71-minute performance of Terry Riley's 'In C' for 99 cents is ridiculous."

The crowning irony, Reed says, came when the New Yorker critic Alex Ross, in a 2006 essay on Feldman, singled out the "Rothko Chapel" recording for praise. Reed figured his ship had finally come in - only to discover that because it contained so few tracks, the disc had been automatically priced by iTunes as an EP.

Other projects

Reed has other projects in the works these days. He organizes concerts for Bard College in nearby Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. He's a sound consultant for the John Cage Foundation. He's working on a project to ease the limits on musical exchanges with Cuba.

None of it, he says, is as fun as making records was.

"Sometimes I go out and meet young people, and when they find out who I am they go, 'Wait, that was you?' And I think, 'Yeah, and I was such an idiot to be that person.'

"I really had this idea that anything was possible. I figured that I could make creative records, and just focus relentlessly on the artistic side. I guess that was stupid, but that's where I was. I wanted to make it like an art gallery, and I figured if I could make the best art possible, then the money would come in."

Perhaps inevitably, Reed never got rich doing what he loved best. But he left the rest of us much the richer - artistically - for his efforts. And that's not nothing.