A friend of mine just got back from Japan. He’s a record producer, Bill Reed by name, who has also published two books: “Hot From Harlem,” a history of black entertainment that profiles key figures, and “Early Plastic,” a memoir of growing up in West Virginia and coming to New York, where he landed in Greenwich Village and became a bookseller, jazz aficionado, literateur and cinéaste.
In the prologue to “Early Plastic,” Reed tells an anecdote about the title that underscores his turn of mind:
Nearly three decades ago an urban morality fable appeared in The New York Times about a woman awaiting her turn on free appraisal day at Sotheby’s. Ahead of her stood dozens of others also queued up and clutching the requisite mooseheads, kitschy paintings and antique snuff cans, etc. from grandma’s attic. Unlike most of the others’ would-be treasures, however, hers was a small one in the form of an unassuming piece of jewelry.
Upon reaching the front of the line — which stretched out the door and part of the way down New York’s Fifth Avenue — she proffered the item to the auction house official seated at the table. He examined it for a second or two, then gasped, “But madame, this is plastic.”
Without missing so much as a beat (and as if any further proof were needed that hope does indeed spring eternal in the human breast) the undaunted woman immediately, ingenuously, and hopefully replied: “Early plastic?”
Anyway, Reed went to Japan mostly on business and sold a lot of masters, including the Japanese re-issue of jazz singer Pinky Winters’ “Rain Sometimes” with a four-record contract.
“Pinky is so well known in Japan that her name opened doors for me everywhere,” says Reed, who has known and recorded the 77-year-old Winters for many years. She’s my calling card.” The cognoscenti know her as a singer’s singer.
One door Winters’ name opened was that of a 58-year-old Tokyo physician, whose Web site Reed had come across two years ago. “Check out some of the stuff at the site,” he says. “It has not just the most valuable collection of jazz LPs I have ever seen, but also vintage hi-fi equipment, lallique, Tiffany lamps, cacti, sports cars, cat fish, ceremonial tea sets (!), etc.”
Before he left for Japan Reed decided he wanted to meet the physician. So he sent an email and dropped Pinky Winters’ name: “I am her producer.” “Dr. Takeshi Mikami wrote back immediately: ‘Pinky Winters is my favorite singer,'” Reed says. “Soooo hip.”
There could have been a hitch. You know how weird collectors can be. Would someone like Quasimodo come to the door with drool coming out of his mouth over a battery-operated record player and two old Perry Como records? Could his email correspondent have been a fabricated cyber identity?
On the contrary, Dr. Mikami turned out to be eminently sane, “a dear, sweet, gentleman with five children, all of whom are also doctors,” Reed says. The good doctor invited him to be his guest for an afternoon. “It was a truly mind-blowing experience. I even got a chance to listen to ‘Rain Sometimes’ on Dr. Mikami’s high HIGH end speaker system in one of several listening rooms above his clinic.”
Also mind-blowing, Reed says, is Japan’s top 10 list: “It’s remarkably stylistically diverse. A vocal version of the Jupiter movement from Holst’s ‘The Planets’ was recently the No. 1 song. That’s one result of ongoing musical literacy in that country. They still have music classes at every grade level and nearly everyone there can navigate at least one instrument. Which brings to mind what the great jazz drummer Max Roach recently (slyly and diplomatically) remarked re: rap: ‘People who voted for defunding of music education programs in public schools are getting what
they paid for.'”
