Jazz Lover Remains Loyal to Distinctly Retro Tastes

Paul Affeldt is seated at his kitchen table in a small wood house at the base of cliffs overlooking Ventura’s dying oil fields. A coffee maker at his left elbow spits and wheezes, but the brew is for guests. Affeldt sips a beer kept cold by his worn Red Lobster Huggie.

“Charlie Parker?” he snorts. “Miles Davis?”

He looks up, pausing, eyes fixed squarely through powerful glasses. “Oh, I can’t speak about them. Charlie Parker was be-bop, and that was pure chaos. Just cut me off at, say, Count Basie. I can’t really hear anything that’s considered modern.”

Affeldt is, at first encounter, something of a proud crank. He delights in dismissing the artistically significant, the recognized high priests of an evolving music.

But then, amid his hardened declarations, he’ll betray himself with warm smiles and rolling effusions about the players whose music he has devoted more than four decades of his adult life to: Brun Campbell, Dink Johnson, Euday Bowman, Speckled Red, Buster Wilson, Stump Johnson, Neville Dickie, (Cripple) Clarence Lofton, Meade (Lux) Lewis, Guy (The Bear) Richards, Knocky Parker and dozens of other early, often obscure jazz pianists whose boogie woogie and blues and stride became bedrock for the minings of people such as Charlie Parker and Miles Davis.

Affeldt is thus his own Smithsonian force in jazz music, having cast wide nets for old recordings, Nickelodeon rolls and radio transcriptions that he commits to vinyl LP records. His label, produced and directed and warehoused at his tiny home here, is called Euphonic--the very name an inspiration from Scott Joplin’s masterful and complex ragtime tune “Euphonic Sounds.”

Through the years, Affeldt has peddled perhaps 40,000 records, most by mail order. And just as his tastes are retro, so are his technologies.

“I won’t ever be doing anything on CD,” he says. “I don’t play the game. High-quality vinyl pressings have fine sound. They brought the sound of things up as much as anything else. All I can say about technology development is: Remember the eight-track tape. I don’t even own a CD here for my own listening, never will.”

He pauses.

“I do have an Edison cylinder, though. Would you like to see it?”

*

Euphonic was never so busy as to allow Affeldt to pursue his passion full-time. For years he worked in the Ventura post office. Now, at age 63, he drives a Meals on Wheels van five days a week.

Indeed, Euphonic is in something of a torpor right now. Its last issue--No. 27--was in 1992, with the haunting, sometimes elegiac piano work of Paul Lingle, an enigmatic Californian whose fluid stomp, stride and rags are captured on such tunes as “Ostrich Walk,” “Shake That Thing” and “Shim-Me-Sha-Wabble.”

Affeldt, however, is untroubled by this.

He still retains two distributors and “gets the occasional request for some records.” All his issues are in stock, and when they’re sold out, “that’s that,” he says, adding: “When the current Euphonic stock is gone, so, probably, is Euphonic. You might say I’m on hold. I’m slowing down, and it’s very hard to find new material.”

New material, of course, is very old. It’s in someone’s attic on a piano roll or is a fragile home recording that wobbles from exposure to heat; or, it’s found in a flea-market bin on a scratched 78 from 1950.

The dynamics of such recordings--that is, the sonic values of bass and treble response--were never a troubling issue for Affeldt. That, characteristically, marks the true jazz listener: someone whose ears are more tuned to the direction of melody and syntax of notes than in prettiness of pure sounds.

As a result, Euphonic’s early jazz is a music whose vitality remains intact, whose rhythmic surge and force of invention often carry with it the power of jazz’s most modern masters.

*

The raw vitality of early, New Orleans-based jazz is what got Affeldt in the first place, long before he started Euphonic. In high school in his native Sheridan, Wyo., in the late 1940s, he listened happily with the rest of America to the swing music of Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington.

But something larger happened when he found a Kid Ory/Bunk Johnson record.

“It hit deep,” he says. “I just couldn’t believe it. I threw all my swing records into the creek after that.”

In 1950, he chased his girlfriend to California. Ironically, Kid Ory, a Creole musician, had moved from New Orleans to Los Angeles years before to open a chicken ranch, only to come out of retirement at Orson Welles’ urging and, in 1921, to become the first black musician to record a jazz record.

Affeldt spent the ‘50s in the Army but wrote for the fledgling Jazz Report, a jazz-lovers’ magazine that he took over in 1959. His self-education in jazz’s roots music grew, and in 1962 he purchased his first two tapes with the intention of recording. One featured Brun Campbell, Scott Joplin’s only white student; the other Dink Johnson, who’d come to California from New Orleans in 1912 with the Creole Orchestra. The release, “The Professors: Vol. 1,” has remained among Euphonic’s best sellers.

Affeldt’s Jazz Report later merged with the now popular and fat Mississippi Rag, a tabloid whose April issue lists no fewer than 48 old-time jazz festivals for the months of April and May alone. Affeldt, a contributor to Rag, smiles when noting a resurgence of interest in the old music.

If, as Affeldt says, his Euphonic label is “on hold,” Affeldt’s broad smile suggests that anything, in truth, can happen.

Jazz is that way, has always been that way. It’s nothing you can’t hear on a vinyl LP pulled from one loner’s house on the edge of oil fields here.