Talkin' Square Biz with Arkadia Prez Bob Karcy

This interview was first published at All About Jazz in October 1997.

This past June, Bob Karcy, President and Founder of the award-winning V.I.E.W. Video company, announced the signings of Dave Liebman, Benny Golson and Billy Taylor to his newly-formed Arkadia Entertainment Corporation.

"Just what the world needs, another jazz record label," Karcy notes wryly, "but we're NOT just another jazz record label."

Arkadia Jazz plans to release about twenty-five CDs through the rest of 1997, including new albums by Liebman (the label has already assembled three projects by the soprano saxophonist), Golson and Taylor, by the The Moscow Sax Quintet, and also plans to release remastered sides by Django Reinhardt with Coleman Hawkins, and recently discovered sessions by such stalwarts as Red Garland, Kenny Drew, Jr. and Chet Baker.

And if Arkadia Jazz (along with Arkadia Classical, Arkadia Kids and Arkadia Allworld, a collection of performances by classic French popular singers such as Maurice Chevalier and Edith Piaf) work out half as well as did V.I.E.W. video, Karcy will once again strike while the iron is hot in both the creative and the commercial sense, this time with (sometimes enhanced) audio instead of video—the typed list of awards presented to V.I.E.W. videos (its total catalog nears two hundred titles) is nearly five single-spaced typewritten pages and includes: Best Concert Jazz Presentation from the International Film Salon in 1995 for Ron Carter and Art Farmer: Live at Sweet Basil; UPI's 1995 Year's Best in Jazz for Oscar Peterson: Music In The Key of Oscar; Picasso: The Man and His Work, a Cannes Film Festival Official Selection; Mabel Mercer: A Singer's Singer and Mabel Mercer: Cabaret Artist, a Video Review's Critics' Choice; and Nancy Wilson at Carnegie Hall, is honored in the Museum of Broadcasting Permanent Collection, while The V.I.E.W. Jazz Collection is similarly cited in the Permanent Jazz Archives of the Smithsonian Institute.

Arkadia's first issue includes New Vista, their first project with Dave Liebman (who was recently the first jazz artist honored with an Honorary Doctorate bestowed by the renown Sibelius Academy of Music in Helsinki); Music Keeps Us Young by the Billy Taylor Trio, resplendent with the pianist's interpretations of jazz and pop classics such as "Body And Soul," "Naima" and "Lover Come Back"; a swinging live set from bop tenor Benny Golson; and Jazz Influence from the bossa-nova-meets-bop of Brazil's Nova Bossa Nova.

Though a label publicist warned us that it might be difficult to find Bob Karcy standing still long enough to talk on the phone, we were able to keep him just long enough to conduct the following interview with All About Jazz.

All About Jazz: What kind of educational and work background leads one to become the founder and president of your own jazz record label? Were you a business major, were you a marketing major, were you a music major—what kind of upbringing prepared you for Arkadia?

Bob Karcy: I was all of those things—a business major at Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and then I went to Music Conservatory in Paris for a short time, I was a musician for I guess about thirteen to fourteen years as a youth (I played trumpet but I studied arranging and composition). So that the love of music and the background has always been there. I was actually born kind of... in transit' in London, England, and grew up in Brazil as a child and came to the U.S. as a youth.

And I guess when I was in my very very late teens I went over to Europe and stayed over there for about four and one-half years when I did attend the Music Conservatory and I was a musician based out of Europe. And then I came back to the States and joined the army, and as life sometimes comes along and waves its hand at you I was diverted in another industry for about ten years which has nothing to do with the music industry, but I was always kind of doing music projects in that industry. And I then decided that I wanted to get out of an industry where every morning was Monday morning, even though I had built quite a substantial business with a couple hundred people and about seven locations.

I started by getting back into what I thought I wanted to do, which was the music business. I went into artist management and music consulting, switched out of that, got into distribution, I went back to Europe, and kind of was able to put together some music programming for French programming initially. I became, I guess, the agent of three of the European television networks for I guess about three or four years, where I was putting together all of their television specials and music productions that they would show in the United States. So we did a Memphis blues show, and we did the music of Broadway, we did a Las Vegas show and we did some jazz shows, and at the same time I got involved in the television syndication business and licensing business.

And in the very very early days of the home video industry, in the early Eighties, I had built up a nice large catalog of music programming and operas and ballets and cultural documentaries, that was essentially syndicating around the world, world-wide television and other media. And out of frustration about not being able to place these with any of the new home video companies, who just wanted horror movies and various other "A" movies—there was really no special interest, non-movie business at the time—my producers urged me to put some of them out myself, and I decided to start V.I.E.W. video, where we put together a catalog which today represents I guess close to 250 to 300 titles.

AAJ: It did seem curious, how one would get started in the video industry, but it sounds like it was almost a natural extension of what you had been doing all along.

BC: Well, it was an unnatural extension because the industry did not yet really exist. So in the early Eighties we were one of the first companies that decided to package this type of, I guess PBS-style and cultural programming, and I guess we started a little bit differently from most companies who announced they were in the video business and decided to have two or three or four titles that were kind of disparate interests—I remember one company had one on chocolate, cooking with chocolate, and another one I think it was on knitting and a third one on travel and a fourth one, I don't remember the fourth, but there were like four completely different areas.

And we came out with really what represented a line at that time, I think we launched with twenty-some titles, of which there was a representation of jazz, some live concerts of some pretty well-known jazz artists like Gil Evans and Louie Bellson and Billy Cobham. I remember we had a Billie Holiday tape as one of our first tapes, still one of our all-time best-sellers called "The Lady Sings The Blues." And then we had an assortment of some well-known dance companies and some operas and classical music. And a couple of instructional programs in them, I don't even remember what they were at this time. And I guess this was about fourteen years ago.

Since that time we've evolved so that about a third of our catalog in V.I.E.W. video is made up of mostly concerts and some documentaries of major jazz artists and some nostalgia TV programming, some country, gospel, world music titles. So we have videos of wonderful documentaries of Oscar Peterson, Herbie Hancock and Billie Holiday, we have the Paris Opera Ballet and the Bolshoi Ballet, so it's pretty high profile stuff. And about a third of our catalog is in the performing arts of opera and dance and classical music. And the last third, which is actually pretty much from a standpoint of sales proven to be our most successful, is kind of an upscale niche, kind of an informational-instructional documentaries—parenting programs, we have some sports programs do really well, we have some compilation ice-skating tapes of well-known ice skaters, we have a children's instructional series called the "Look And Learn" series, very specific health and fitness tapes, we have a very successful series called "Exercise Can Beat Arthritis," we have some tapes on childbirth, we have some documentaries, we have a wonderful documentary on John Kennedy narrated by James Earl Jones that's won a number of awards.

So we have this assortment of programs that we market both to video stores that have some rental departments where in addition to the Horror and Comedy section you go over into the Documentary section and the Health section and whatever, the Music section. So some of the video stores like the Blockbusters have some for rental, we do a lot of marketing into schools and libraries and curriculum orientation. We are very well-represented in sales to the record chains and bookstores that video departments, people like Tower and Virgin Megastore and Borders Books & Video.

And we've found these niche markets for video, and kind of from there felt that our own passion, and I've always felt that there's been a blurring of distinction between audio and video, and kind of felt... if you had told people may six, seven, eight years ago that you were going to go into Tower and you were gonna buy something that looks like a CD and it's got pictures on it whether you want it or not. And in fact maybe that's DVD as that comes out, we're currently translating some programs where you can take one of our home video programs and you'll essentially be able to watch it on your DVD player on your DVD-ROM drive, or on who knows what else will come on down the road.

And so this progression to the record company from the video was a natural one, with the passion that we have for the music, and just the marketing that we've built up internally that differentiates ourselves from a lot of the companies that are out there now in the traditional record business.

AAJ:Then is running a CD company substantially different from running a video company?

BC: Well, there are areas in the record company that you don't have in the video company—for example, there is no radio component in video and so from a standpoint of promoting your CDs we have a strong presence that we had to develop and create in servicing jazz radio so they would play our cuts. The PR, I mean, there's PR in both, but there's a whole music press that's different, the buyers in retail are different. There's a lot of overlap, but there's certain things that are different.

The dealings with the artists, we never really had the luxury of being able to have an artist support the promotion and the sales of the video; very often, the videos don't come on the market until several years later, and they were made and not released on CD, and they were made for a television network or something and they don't come out in video, and the artists are not particularly aware of when it came out, etc., etc. So the difference in the audio of course is that we have these relationships with these artists like Billy Taylor and Dave Liebman and Benny Golson, who are Arkadia recording artists.

We felt that in starting up Arkadia, the thing is, coming from this other audio-visual shield, there's been missing the concept of having kind of one entity that would be able to bring together all of the different talents and create a business model for these musicians under one roof that could market their videos and instructional things and music publishing and the CDs and create enhanced CDs, all these other things, which has basically been the start of the concept of Arkadia.

AAJ:That's quite a catchy company slogan—"Just what the world needs, another jazz record label."

BC: But we're not just another jazz record label...

AAJ: ... it continues. Was there any flavor of that at all in the reactions of Mssrs. Taylor, Liebman, Golson—Just what I need, another independent start-up label telling me all the wonderful things they can do for me'?

BC: I think the artists have proven to me extremely receptive to what we're doing after asking the hard questions, and, frankly, a lot of this has been crystallized along the way. We actually just released the first CDs about three, four months ago, and so a lot of this is a work-in-progress. We have a long-time business experience, we have a substantial warehouse, we have personnel in marketing and sales and administration to be able to do it. It's one thing being outside the industry, and it's another being inside and trying to bring to fruition some of these theories that you've come up with, that you've brainstormed, sticking with people in a closed office in an environment that you can implement—some of them you can, and some of them take time so I can't even say that you can't right now.

The reception has been wonderful, and frankly the artists have been very very receptive to what we're doing. We're very very artist-oriented; our motto is, "Arkadia Jazz—The Artists' Choice." That means working with them and being able to not necessarily pigeon-hole them by saying, "Okay, we need one record every year. This year it's going to be a Cole Porter album, next year it's going to be a Rogers and Hammerstein, and next year... ' But some artists truly excel at a number of different styles, and we want to be able to accommodate that. And we feel that if we can create a base at radio and at retail and in the media and among the fans who are fans of this artist, they will be receptive to many different things that the artist will do. So we'll take the same artist, with somebody like Dave Liebman, the first album we released has gotten a tremendous amount of praise—thank you to the industry—and has been lauded as really his most accessible and kind of upbeat to date (that's his new album called New Vista, his new album with his group), and his second album that we're releasing is a live performance on the thirtieth anniversary of John Coltrane's "Meditation Suite," which is much more spiritual music, more difficult for the listener if you're not into it. And so we're able to present both with the same artist; in the case of the "Meditations," we're releasing an enhanced CD of it, David has written a forty-page study of the original suite, and there about 350 "hot keys" from there. And so each project kind of takes on a life of its own, but all of this is part of the integrity of the artist."

The third thing we have in the can already with Dave; he is extremely prolific and we wanted to able to respond to that, we don't want to necessarily say, ... Well, let's release an album every year...

AAJ: That was reported to be one of the main sources of conflict between Prince and Warner Brothers—that he was recording massive reams of new music, and the label was consistently putting his new material back on the shelf in order to milk one more single off of his already-released albums.

BC: "It's a real challenge to be able to satisfy both parties, because you can't live in an artistic vacuum and you can't live in a marketing vacuum. The two have to go hand in hand, and some of the costs of marketing these albums are such that... you may have to be able to work an album longer than the artist would want. But I'm not sure that means that you couldn't release ANOTHER album; it probably means you shouldn't release the same KIND of album, but if you look at other pop artists, they may release an album every two or three years because as soon as you release a new one it takes away from the sales of the last one. And on the other hand, some of those albums literally take a year and a-half to make, so... they might need a real long gestation period for that project."

In the case of Dave Liebman, who is very prolific and works endless hours, he's able to do a few more projects than some others. We have other new artists, it'll take them a year and a-half to do an album. So we have to kind of, I think, try to be able to be aware and sensitive to the artist's timing. And it's hard—you can't just push a button and you have creativity.

AAJ: There's one more instance where I'd like to quote yourself to you. There's a couple of sentences in your press announcement that seem to go together and underscore what you just explained: "Our bottom line is not records sold, but music made." And then: "Nothing boosts sales like great music.""

Well, hopefully you can find some synergy and make one plus one plus one equal four or five, and each one of these things becomes somewhat organic and takes on its own life with the fans. And some things take off sooner, some things take off later, some things don't take off, they're just works of prestige that you're proud of and that you want to have as part of your label and part of your, as an artist, part of your life's work. You put out some of these projects and you've made your artistic statement. Another thing that we try, and this is probably in another one of my quotes, is that our work only starts in the recording studio. I mean, after the studio's over, that's when we have to work it and develop it for years and years, and to try and get the word out.

I guess the biggest challenge is, how do we get people to hear the music, how do we get them to listen to something in an era that there is an absolute inundation of product. How do you differentiate the product and get people to give it a chance? Give us five minutes, please, and give a listen'? You're competing with the internet, you're competing with movies, you're competing with cable and you're... you know, so it's a challenge. Of course, as the artists tour, as we get great critique, and as we keep every single level from the recording to the mixing to the mastering, with the packaging we've tried to be innovative and respectful to the music; we've developed packaging where every CD folder kind of opens up into a mini-poster, and has liner notes by established writers like Net Hentoff and Howard Mandel and Stanley Crouch. And I think that this enhances and makes a complete listening experience for the buyer, and they get the full impact of both the music and the communication through the packaging and the liner notes and the artists' observations of what is intended and why. And hopefully they'll enjoy it, or see the integrity with which it was made.

AAJ: In what way do you think the internet has helped the foundation of Arkadia, or has it helped in some ways but hindered it in other ways?

BC: I think it's just beginning, and I think the jury is out. Actually, it's a little bit early for me to be able to judge. Because our website actually just went up about two weeks ago, and we're still tweaking it, but actually this morning we got thirty or forty e-mail messages that I saw that came off of the internet, and... I think that, as an industry and as a public and as consumers, we have to see what the true integrity of the internet is. I don't think that anybody knows, to the extent that it's informational, to the extent that it's promotional, to the extent that you're going to sell on it—what you're going to do and how you're going to use it. You get zillions of hits, but I don't know if that reflects any true activity. So I think that it's now like the early days of video; I think that for video to truly take off, you had to find something that had truly had integrity as to why it should be on video. And the best example was, there was a book that sold several hundreds of thousands of units as a book. But when it was put on video, it sold several million, because it had true integrity. And what was that? It was Jane Fonda's exercise video, which first came out as a book. So even though it was successful as a book, the true integrity of the medium was such because of the interactivity of the video, because of the nature of being able to put it on when you want, how long you wanted, etc., it worked so that people would truly benefit from it being on video.

So I think that we haven't quite found yet how and what the true benefit of the internet is yet. I know a lot of it bores me, unless I'm looking for information or reference. We have to find out how the internet will evolve and we certainly want to be a player and we want to be there. We're using it very much like a complete, full information database, even for our own sales reps around the world and our own database and our own retailers, who can go in and check every aspect; on a CD folder you can only put so much information, but on the internet you can add as much text as you want, studies and more research, and alternate takes and full credits. We even put a picture gallery of each of our artists, pictures of them throughout their career, we put on extended biographies, long biographies, timelines, discographies, and I guess as an information media for someone who wants to peel away the layers and dig in and get that information for whatever reason, they'll be able to find it. So I think that part of it is finding this out and designing your site so that it gives information for the people who feel passionate about this kind of music.

AAJ: Correctly or not, some people seem to feel that jazz is somehow beyond them,' that they have to be a musician or possess some technical knowledge to understand jazz. How can people like us at "AAJ" do a better job of making jazz seem less intimidating?

First of all, we use this word "jazz, this general, all-encompassing word. Or we think it pigeonholes one thing, but it actually represents a whole spectrum of music, going back from Dixieland, New Orleans traditional and swing, and bop and post-bop and free. And some of it is more difficult than others. But in the same way as, if you were learning mathematics the first class that you would not take is trigonometry. You'd start by learning how to add and how to subtract, how to multiply and how to divide. Or, it's like... I don't know...

I think that jazz is an acquired taste. And I think that if you start somebody with the most difficult part to start with... it's the same as classical music—there's some classical that's very accessible, and there's some classical that's very inaccessible. But I think that there is a little bit of a learning process in jazz. Number one, if you started with something like simple melodies that people are accessible to, then they might get drawn to learning that in improvising there IS a structure, and there are certain rules to the game of improvising, and by listening to it more and more you can judge who's improvising better or who didn't quite hit it off.

There are other levels and layers in it. Layers in jazz that don't deal with just melody and chords, because jazz is volume and jazz is silence. Jazz is texture. Jazz is colors, jazz is harmony, jazz is a mood, jazz is a feeling, jazz is the most democratic, individualistic kind of music. Where, if you hear ten orchestras playing Beethoven's Ninth, it would be pretty darn hard to pick out which one was which. But if you heard ten people playing Thelonious Monk's "Round Midnight," you might get ten different versions of the same piece. And I think that... I guess that the media can help, I think that there's more, part of it has to do with education, part of it has to do with word of mouth, part of it has to do with people who enjoy jazz and understand a little bit, introducing and giving their friends a taste of it.

I'm not sure, I think the media has a different role—if you were writing a piece for "Elle" magazine, you would not treat it the same as you would a piece for "Cadence" or "Coda" or "Jazz Times" or a jazz educational magazine, and you wouldn't lower or change yourself to a different level, but you would direct it to your audience that was responsive to that. So I think that in the media a lot of what the media is doing is... well, from the standpoint of criticism, is strictly one person's personal opinion. Who is to qualify who that writer is? Is it a fan who really knows something, is it somebody who is a musician, who has a doctorate in music or who went to a music conservatory and feels qualified to judge it? Is it just an individual who's listened a lot? I'm not sure what qualifies a media writer to be a writer about jazz—do they just have to be a good writer? Do they have to know about music? So I think that if people recognize there is a craft by which we judge musicians, and a technique by which we judge them—how many times have you and I read something about a movie or a TV show or a book or a CD or whatever, and we haven't necessarily agreed upon it? We're allowed to have our own judgment. Sure, it helps if there are thousands of CDs put out and you read a review on three of them and two of them are great; you don't have time to go through the thousands, so you hope that someone has made some kind of judgment for you.

The whole subject of jazz writing and jazz criticism is just something else. I think sometimes that part of the most frustrating thing that a jazz writer will call himself a critic, and I'll read some kind of review about the concert and it doesn't say anything except describe the concert—the names of the tunes that they did and the instrumentation and the time it started and when the people applauded and when they didn't. That doesn't really necessarily make it criticism; is it reportage? Are we just describing the event.

AAJ: What did we not talk about that you would like to talk about in closing?

BC: The future of what we're trying to do, that differentiates Arkadia Jazz from other labels. And part of that I think is, not part of it, pretty much all of it, is finding or having these wonderful artists find us, helping them be a catalyst to creating projects that they feel are the best of their career. And that's what personally so satisfying to me, when we record legendary artists as Dr. Billy Taylor and Benny Golson and Dave Liebman now in this younger generation, but these people are experienced and they've made HUNDREDS of recordings between them. And yet they feel that these are among if not THE best that they've ever done, and they feel best about it. That's the best reward to us, the fact that the artist who is so rarely satisfied (they all think that they could go in and do it better), but the fact that they feel that this is work at their highest level.

I feel that as a company we've created an atmosphere, both from the standpoint of production and feedback, that has enabled us to plant the seed so that they can really get the finest music out. And that's what I'm talking about, differentiating the music now and into the future, and giving them the opportunity of saying everything they have to say. Some of them including writing—some of these artists are fine, fine writers and educators, really developed careers in other areas and are greatly respected. So we're building on those artists while introducing new artists we feel strongly about.

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