Gwen Ansell Jazz
‘You know,” says Damon Forbes, “with all my artists, right up to now, I couldn’t tell whether any of them played a bum note.” This bluff philistine act might just fool you if you didn’t know who Forbes was. He looks the part: six-foot, rugby-player shoulders, ruddy face — the kind of guy you might find propping up the bar at 206, there not so much for the jazz as the tequila.
But Forbes is supremo of the Sheer Sounds record label and distribution network which has released original albums from (among others) Busi Mhlongo, Pops Mohamed, Sipho Gumede, Zim Ngqawana, McCoy Mrubata, Tony Cox, Gito Baloi — and (probably the label’s top-seller to date) Paul Hanmer’s beautiful Trains to Taung. If the Melt 2000 label has put South Africa on to the World Music circuit abroad, Sheer Sounds has done something equally remarkable at home this year: blown away the cobwebs of nostalgia and given commercial profile to the country’s new generation of jazzers. His showcase package at Mega Music earlier this month drew 900-strong audiences on both nights, something inconceivable three years back when the label started.
Not bad for a philistine.
Forbes started his affair with music marketing as a student, toiling behind the counter at Look & Listen, and falling in love with the music of the Windham Hill label, still one of his relaxants of choice today. He spent time managing finance and marketing for another independent, Tic-Tic Bang, moved on, “looking for space to explore alternative avenues of marketing”, to a meditation/trance label, Higher Octave, and founded Sheer Sounds in November 1994.
And though he enjoys the music he works with, his passion is clearly reserved for selling, rather than listening. The showcase concerts are a primary tool. “To market well, you need a reputable product, plus slick production, good sound. Clubs don’t provide that.
“Our first concert was for Busi Mhlongo — just media. It didn’t make a cent. Then, for Tony Cox, we invited retailers too — and the retailers who came played the album in their shops, and found it sold. Every time, we were learning how to improve concert production and sound quality. Now we work with a mix of industry guests and paying audience. The concerts still don’t make money, but that isn’t the point. We’re trying to showcase the product to its best possible advantage, and give artists a context where they can enjoy playing and give their best.”
There are other elements in the strategy: priority racking “makes all the difference” which means establishing a good relationship with retailers. Forbes still goes out on sales calls “and all our reps are people who can focus in an informed way on a new and unknown product”.
Forbes demands good covers and sleeve notes: “the standard joke was you could always spot a South African album — it was the one with the blank inner”. Trains to Taung, with collectors’ item liner notes in metallic ink on Chinese funeral money has been nominated for packaging awards. “It was a bastard to print, kept jamming in the machines, and I had to spend my Sunday afternoons hand-filling the CD cases. But it was worth doing.”
Sheer Sounds already has links with close to a dozen international jazz, trance and Worldbeat labels as South African distributor. Now Forbes is looking to reverse the links, getting overseas labels to service his catalogue for distribution. Recent sampler albums Sheer Jazz and African Jazz Men are designed to showcase South African sounds at next year’s Midem exposition.
At home, Forbes plans several new solo releases and concept albums next year — “We’d like to do a Bass Line album, catching the regular jazz artists there” — and is confident there’s a “growing market for quality African music. The appreciation was always around; now black music buyers are beginning to have the spending power too.” Through Sheer Sounds Direct, with its newsletters, offers and mail order facility, the company is reaching out to fans in the townships — “there are still no record shops where many of the people on our database live”.
Forbes feels that getting more local content on to the airwaves is “incredibly important” to industry growth, and is concerned that both the Independent Broadcasting Authority and South African Music Rights Organisation should be energetic in pursuing defaulters. “Samro’s now started quarterly reporting: that’s the kind of thing we need.”
But at the core of the Sheer Sounds’ effort, he places the musicians. “I like them all as people, and I respect them for the credibility they have with audiences. It’s that which has given the label credibility. And for that reason, outside keeping them to budget. I’ve never tried to hinder the artists in their creativity, or tamper with what they do. For me, that’s key.”