ACT Records: 'It doesn't happen like this in the corporate world'

When its star artist Esbjörn Svensson died in a scuba accident, ACT Records almost called it a day. Instead, it's just reached its 20th anniversary on top of the jazz world

John Fordham

The Guardian, Thursday 12 January 2012 21.49 GMT

If Stax, Motown or Sun Records figure in pop iconography as labels almost as famous as the legends they launched, Blue Note, Riverside, Impulse! or ECM are jazz music's equivalents – even if they are less likely to wind up as answers in a pub quiz. In its heyday in the 1950s and 60s, Blue Note was almost as widely admired for Esquire designer Reid Miles's cool typography and brooding, deep-hued cover images (shots that took you straight to the bar of a midnight Manhattan jazz club, boiling with noise) as it was for its star signings of the era – Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Wayne Shorter. Germany's ECM has a comparably glamorous catalogue of stars (the post-60s generation of innovators from America's Keith Jarrett to Norway's Jan Garbarek, and a constantly expanding roster of gifted newcomers) and its own instantly recognisable graphics.

Now comes another strong contender for the same podium – ACT Records. Like ECM, it is a Munich-based independent with a striking house style; this year it celebrates its 20th anniversary. ACT is bucking the worldwide trend of declining CD sales over a period in which major-label commercial activity has shrunk by half. In common with many creative, jazz-rooted record companies, it is also the labour of love of a single enthusiast, Siegfried "Siggi" Loch, a voluble, effusively energetic jazz-lover and former Warner Brothers executive.

Unlike some jazz producers and label owners whose apprenticeship was as players or fans, Loch has the traditional record industry in his bones. He started at the bottom, as a salesman for EMI in 1960, before becoming managing director of the German arm of the newly formed Liberty Records/United Artists label, with special responsibility for the Blue Note catalogue.

Across the decades from the 60s to the 90s (a period in which he was CEO of WEA Music in Hamburg, and eventually WEA European president in London), Loch was constantly on the verge of deals to fund his own record label, only to see them founder on corporate takeovers and boardroom bust-ups. By 1988, he was close to a funding agreement with Polygram, until his contact there got fired "and the new guy said, 'Why do we need jazz?' So I decided it was the last time I made that mistake, and I would do nothing I couldn't handle and pay for myself."

ACT Records boss Siegfried Loch.
ACT Records finally got underway in 1992, at first with back-catalogue material Loch had access to, including fusion saxist Klaus Doldinger's popular Passport band, and classic blues artists including John Lee Hooker. Then came Jazzpana, Loch's own idea for a jazz-flamenco crossover performed by Spanish jazz and traditional musicians, the late American saxophonist Michael Brecker and big-band arrangements by Vince Mendoza. It was the start of a succession of genre-bending initiatives that might have seemed out of character for a producer who was a long-time blues and Sidney Bechet fan.

But the seeds had been planted in Loch's first job at EMI, when his work included handling offbeat imports; he became fascinated by flamenco, Indian and Argentinian music. "I heard a direct connection between the blues and all kinds of elementary folk musics around the world," he says. "That's still crucial to what this label's all about."

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/jan/12/act-records-motown-of-jazz