EXOTIC MUSIC? IT’S JUST A MAILBOX AWAY

Ever wonder what zoukc music from the Caribbean sounds like? Longing for a taste of qawwali music from Pakistan?

Tracking down exotic musical styles can be a daunting prospect, even for devotees accustomed to hounding specialty record stores. But Original Music, a mail-order operation specializing in non-Western pop and classic folk music from around the world, is one way around the problem.

“Our center is on the subject area, not the medium,” said John Storm Roberts, who runs Original Music with Anne Needham from a drafty wooden barn behind their home outside this tiny Upstate New York town. The firm sells books, records and videos manufactured by other companies, and has put out one video and several records of its own.

Quipped Roberts: “If someone figures out a way to do world music holographs, we’ll do world music holographs.”

Roberts, 50, who personally reviews and selects all the material offered by Original Music, isn’t a trained ethnomusicologist with esoteric tastes. The British-born journalist-author is on the prowl for music that falls between the academy and the airwaves.

“There’s an enormous amount of terrific, ‘real people’ popular music that’s damned hard to find,” he observed. “The commercial industry is only interested in what’s happening, and most ethnomusicologists disapprove of it as being Westernized.

“I don’t care how esoteric it is, but it’s got to be terrific--not this, ‘You can’t hear it and it’s terribly performed, but it’s really very interesting because it’s the only winkle-gathering song to come out of southeastern Sussex,’ attitude.”

Roberts developed an early enthusiasm for world music. His father brought back Portuguese 78s from business trips and Roberts collected early calypso, traditional jazz and whatever other records whetted his curiosity as a London teen-ager.

“When you’re 14 or 15,” he observed, “nothing’s weird unless you have peers around to tell you that it’s weird.”

Roberts graduated from Oxford in 1959 after studying French and German and literature. He began writing about music after landing a job as a sub-editor for a newspaper in Kenya.

“I found this rather intriguing guitar music and did this huge article with photographs, transcriptions off records and interviews with all the musicians,” he said. “I got paid $12.50 for it from the East African Standard in 1964.”

After returning to England in 1966 and working for the African language service of the BBC, Roberts moved to New York City in 1970 to become editor of Africa Report magazine. He spent most of the ‘70s as a free-lance journalist specializing in black and Latin music and authored two highly regarded books, “Black Music of Two Worlds” and “The Latin Tinge.”

Roberts and Needham, who ran her own public relations firm, married in 1981 and started Original Music on a part-time basis the following year. It became a full-time operation after Roberts and Needham moved here three years ago.

The detective work involved in tracking down the music is the fun part for Roberts. Getting the records from distributors is a process he described as “frustrating and kind of comic.”

“The stories we could tell you about suppliers--like the French distributor who’s been shipping stuff here for three years and then suddenly sent a consignment to the old address in Brooklyn,” he sighed. “Or the Germans that shipped a bunch of records by sea freight so they cost $10 a record for shipping costs.”

But those difficulties haven’t diminished the enthusiasm of Roberts and Needham, nor swayed their determination to keep expanding. They just inaugurated a Performing Arts catalogue and are considering a newsletter to fill the gap between fanzines and the academic journals.

“Original Music is a means of sharing an enthusiasm I have for the real thing,” summed up Roberts. “I have certain skills, and one of the best forms of life is to put together your enthusiasm and skills and find a way of keeping yourself by it.

“It’s a little service, the old thing about niche marketing. There’s only a certain number of people in the world who are interested in what Original Music can bring them, but it’s very clear from the letters we get that those people are extremely pleased that we exist.”

Information: Original Music, R.D. 1, Box 190, Lasher Road, Tivoli, N.Y., 12583. Phone: (914) 756-2767.