Dan Storper, Evangelist of World Music, Dies at 74

New York Times

8 hours ago

Dan Storper, a retailer who founded the Putumayo World Music record label, which gathered sounds from every corner of the globe, helping to propel the world music boom of the 1990s and beyond with compilation CDs that sold in the millions, died on May 22 at his home in New Orleans. He was 74.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, his son, William, said.
Mr. Storper's label began as an offshoot of Putumayo, a now-closed retail chain that he started in New York in 1975, selling handicrafts and clothing from around the world. He founded the label with a friend, Michael Kraus, in 1993, and it became a showcase for genres that had received little mainstream recognition, especially in the United States, such as zouk, from Guadeloupe in the Caribbean; soukous, from Congo; and son cubano, from Cuba.
With distinctive folk-art album covers by the British artist Nicola Heindl, the label developed a strong brand identity, luring neophyte buyers who broadly understood what they were getting with a Putumayo release, even if they knew nothing about the music itself.
'The whole concept was to bring the music to a community of people that weren't specifically world music freaks, but were interested in music and culture and travel,' Jacob Edgar, Putumayo's longtime ethnomusicologist, said in an interview. 'It was really almost more of a lifestyle brand at its height, and that was really revolutionary at the time.'
Others came to agree. 'Before Putumayo came along, world music was dry field recordings,' Chris Fleming, of the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, said in an interview with The New York Times in 2003. 'Putumayo single-handedly revolutionized the whole genre.'
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