INTERVIEW: Happy 30th to Putumayo, game changers in world music
Photo: Dan Storper is the CEO and founder of Putumayo World Music. Photo courtesy of Putumayo World Music / Provided by Press Junkie PR with permission.
Chances are if a person is a lover of world music, jazz, reggae, folk, yoga-inspired music or other indie sounds, that person has likely heard of Putumayo World Music, the legendary record label that has been releasing carefully curated compilations of new and dance-inducing songs for several years. In fact, in 2023, the company is celebrating 30 years of celebrating this wide variety of music from various cultures throughout the world.
The albums from Putumayo are instantly recognizable, featuring hand-drawn artwork of musicians playing instruments and partiers reveling; one wants to live in the world of Putumayo after seeing these images. The artwork for Celtic Café, for example, features two players with stringed instruments, serenading a couple sitting at an outside café, perhaps in Ireland. The songs on the album are eclectic and unique, as if they were pulled from the streets of some tucked-away nook of the island country. There’s Michael McGoldrick’s “Waterbound,” followed by Dougie MacLean’s “Are Ye Sleepin Maggie.”
Another recent album, Afro-Cubano, has artwork featuring musicians, palm trees, a prominent red car and a stylized bird with its beak angled upward. The songs include Meissa’s “Femme Noire” from Senegal, Mel Malonga’s “Requiem de l’Amour” from Congo and Eneida Marta’s “Dur Di Kutubel” from Guinea-Bissau.
It’s all in a day’s work for Putumayo and the man who started this company so many years ago.
The early days of Putumayo actually stretch back beyond the early 1990s. In 1975, according to the company’s official website, Dan Storper began a Latin American handicraft store in New York City — also called Putumayo, the name of a river in Colombia that stretches along Ecuador and Peru before reaching the Amazon in Brazil. As the website indicates, Storper was traveling this waterway in 1974, and the name stuck with him. Some of the earliest ideas for what Putumayo World Music would become began with that handicraft store.
“I was playing music that I brought back from the Andes along with some of my favorites like Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, James Taylor and others, and I was kind of mixing it up,” Storper said in a recent phone interview. “Starting a little shop in New York and creating an environment musically was probably the first step.”
The groundwork was set, but the actual spark for creating Putumayo World Music didn’t occur at that handicraft store or even on the East Coast. Years later, Storper, an avid traveler of the world, was stopping over in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco when he heard the African band Kotoja. He was en route from Indonesia to his home in New York, and this California concert impressed him so much that he started thinking of creative ways to showcase that music to a larger audience.
“I was blown away by the band and the music, and got back to New York, and they were kind of playing thrash metal music,” Storper said. “So I think the idea of creating a musical environment that helped support the idea of travel and handicrafts and clothing from around the world was a natural next step.”
It didn’t hurt that Storper was a friend of Richard Foos, a cofounder of Rhino Records. Together they released a couple compilations in April 1993, and Putumayo World Music was officially started, with Storper as CEO and founder.
“So it seems on the one hand a tremendous amount of time has passed,” he said. “On the other hand, when you really look at it, it doesn’t seem that long ago, but it’s an interesting and fun ride.”
The CDs over the years have showcased artists from numerous cultures and backgrounds. Some of the selections for each album come from Storper’s own travels and research, but he’s also quick to give credit to Jacob Edgar, who has worked for Putumayo for more than 20 years. Edgar is an ethnomusicologist and music researcher, and he accomplishes a lot of the behind-the-scenes “weeding out,” as Storper put it.
“Out of the thousands and thousands of songs that we get, we have to narrow it down, and then we have to create a musical sequence and, as we say, take you on a musical journey,” Storper said. “I will say that there’s a tremendous amount of wonderful music that’s coming out of the streaming services, and there’s some pretty decent algorithms that create interesting song options for people. But there is something about the human connection to the music, the idea that you’re picking ultimately songs that create a musical flow, and it is in a sense a mood. Many of our songs made it into films and TV shows and commercials, so I think people tend to look at Putumayo as kind of an entrée into the music of a certain genre or region. And I think that’s what we’ve tried to do with almost 300 compilations.”
Putumayo World Music shows no signs of stopping either. Almost weekly they release a digital EP built around different genres and themes, including reggae, groove, contemporary world music, hip hop and acoustic. There’s party music and several children’s collections as well.
The team usually deals with labels from around the world, but sometimes they also work with individual artists. It’s likely a prized honor to be included on a Putumayo release, even if for only one song, because the whole idea of these compilations is to whet the palate, giving the listener an excuse to go deeper with an artist’s entire catalog.
“In a way, what Putumayo does is try to serve as an introduction to the music of other cultures, and through that the process we are introducing people to artists they would not normally be familiar with,” Storper said. “I remember when we did an album called Brasileiro in the early years of Putumayo, and there was a guy who came up to me who I knew who was Brazilian. He was the leading Brazilian [music] expert in America, and he said, ‘Dan, I don’t know how you did that, but the first four songs on Brasileiro are songs not only that I’ve never heard, but I’ve never even heard of the artists. And I’m leading the Brazilian music expert in the U.S.’ … We’re scouring this vast ocean of music that’s out there and trying to hone in to those wonderful songs that are melodic, that are guaranteed to make you feel good. That’s what Putumayo has been trying to do both on the physical side and the digital side as well.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Click here for more information on Putumayo World Music.
