Ian Nagoski’s Canary Records and the Digital Post-Ottoman Diaspora
On a weekday afternoon this past October, I stopped in Baltimore on my drive down South for a series of shows I was playing. I pulled up to an almost-rural feeling block of row houses in Baltimore. The street was racially integrated, calm, and generally belied the nasty portrayal of the Charm City in the ugly rhetoric of the 2024 election campaign season. I was there to visit Ian Nagoski, musician, former record store owner, professional used book connoisseur, and prolific collector of ephemera of early 20th century recorded media. I have been a fan of Nagoski’s Canary Records reissue label for many years, and I took the opportunity of this trip to propose a visit and interview for the Conversations blog.
Since 2009, Canary Records has released 165 compilations of music focusing on “early 20th century masterpieces (mostly) in languages other than English,” according to the description on the label’s Bandcamp page. These reissue albums, mostly released in digital only format and available exclusively on the Bandcamp indie record platform, have developed a cult following among record fans. In addition to an indefatigable appetite for discovering obscure corners of recorded music history, Nagoski has a flair for intuiting what kinds of recordings will spark curiosity among contemporary music fans. The supple rhythms and (to contemporary American ears) unfamiliar modes, in combination with the universalizing anachronism of early sound recording with its distinguishing evocative mid-range distortion, presents an enticing sonic pleasure to listeners seeking both novelty and a sense of the historic. Nagoski’s releases are characterized by the eclecticism that has long intrigued fans of the avant-garde. Canary reissue albums have included compilations of Slavic mining communities in Pennsylvania, belly dancing records from the night club scene of 1960s Hell’s Kitchen, and retrospectives of stellar women artists born in the former Ottoman Empire, such as rebetiko pioneer Marika Papagika (1890-1943) and the stunning and previously obscure Armenian soprano Zabelle Panosian (1891-1986) who is also the subject of a book Nagoski co-authored.
In the space of this brief essay, I will touch on only a small part of Nagoski’s work, focusing primarily on his releases featuring the music of Jewish immigrant artists—who appear on many records both as performers of music for the Jewish market, and frequently as performers of music marketed towards other communities. I will also venture a few thoughts about the political dimension of idiosyncratic culture-making projects in the current moment of change in American society. In an environment of escalating political division and war, projects of cultural preservation hold a particular stamp of idealism and counterculture. The use of digital platforms to reinvigorate cultural discourses of a profoundly analog nature is a kind of provocation. Nagoski’s project, like other digital archives that preserve and promote early 20th century media, orients the digital towards ends that are, perhaps, suggestive of new hybrid forms of experience. These archives manipulate the familiarity, indeed intimacy of online platforms, to create community between the living and the dead. Digital archives of heritage music harness affects of retrospection, melancholy and wonder towards the cultivation of a politic that pushes back against the inevitability of social isolation and consumerism as the primary affordances of the digital media environment.
Nagoski prefaced our conversation about his record collection with an anecdote about his father, a professional school photographer, who also had an obsessive hobby of collecting. His father collected late industrial-era cultural detritus of various sorts: old amplifiers, haberdashery, and especially pre-WWII English bicycles. Nagoski told me that his father believed this collection was a way of “getting revenge on the rich. Through his powers of observation, he got to have for free what they had paid a lot for and left behind.” While Nagoski told this story as an amusing bit of family lore, it struck me that his father’s collection helped create the sense of collecting as an appropriate outlet for an active imagination. His father’s messy trove of old commercial goods brought to mind Walter Benjamin’s observations about the mythic resonance of antique consumer products for those who encounter them after they have outlived intended function. The ephemera of the past, despite or even because of its quotidian qualities, becomes a revered source of contemplation in the present in part because it offers testimony about the persistence of human experience across the divide of mortality.
Nagoski dates the onset of his collection of music from the Islamic world to around 2005 and the years of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Collecting records was a means to try and push back against the feeling of powerlessness that he felt in relationship to the seemingly endless wars. He was trying to find out “what is the relationship between the United States and the Middle East? Is there anything on these records that can help me understand who are these people that we are killing? Is there a geography to people from these countries here in the US?” Nagoski’s questions led him to seek out music by early 20th century artists, especially focusing on the music of the former Ottoman lands and its minority groups. He developed a particular expertise on Marika Papagika, leading to him trying to learn as much as possible about her life and musical community of immigrants in New York City. Eventually his research led him to Papagika’s family, who he has stayed in touch with. He recently sent them a copy he had acquired of a lovely but obscure record she made titled “Sunflowers.” While his reissue projects raise questions about copyright and ownership of music of the early recording industry, for the families of some of the artists whose work he has uncovered, connecting with the music of their ancestors through Canary Records has been a blessing.
Canary is an outgrowth of a life of heterogenous musical interests, and its roster of albums reveals a broad range of subjects. Nagoski’s reissue projects are especially important as documentation of musics of immigrant communities of ethnic groups of the former Ottoman territory. This music scene is typified by Turkish vernacular song that had a basis in Ottoman classical music performed in the urban centers by a multi-ethnic cohort of artists. Popular song genres were typically performed by musicians from minority communities, including the Greeks, Jews and Armenians who were well established in Ottoman urban centers. Songs frequently existed in multiple variants sung in different languages. This rich multi-linguistic and ethnic collaborative space gave rise to regional musical styles, including rebetika, the music associated with Greek ethnic residents of Turkey who were expelled and resettled in Greece as part of a torturous and violent population exchange in 1923. Rebetika, a definitive musical genre in modern Greek music, had a strong presence in the American Greek immigrant recorded music scene. Early Greek popular records made on both sides of the Atlantic were a site of inter-ethnic collaboration, with Greek-speaking Jews who had been born in the Ottoman Empire, such as singer Roza Eskenazi (1897-1980), one of the formative stars of the genre.
Jewish women singers are well-represented on Nagoski’s reissue albums. Two of his releases, “All My Hopes, All in Vain” and “No News From Tomorrow,” contain the complete known recorded works of Victoria Hazan (1896-1995), perhaps the most important performer of Judeo-Spanish song on record in the United States in the first half of the 20th century. Hazzan performed primarily at social events of her community in the Bronx but made a handful of sides for Metropolitan and Kaliphone, small New York City-based record labels, in the early 1940s. Hazan’s music testifies to the embeddedness of Sephardi Jews in the shared musical soundscape of the multi-cultural post-Ottoman soundscape and its afterlife in immigrant communities in the United States. This scene was focused in New York, where a critical mass of immigrants could support a thriving night club scene. Marko Melkon (1894-1963), the wonderful Armenian-Greek oud player and band leader who played regularly in the Hell’s Kitchen belly dancing night clubs, performed on Hazan’s records, positioning her music in the vibrant musical life of the city’s multi-ethnic music scene.
In some ways, Nagoski’s work with post-Ottoman musicians recalls the collection of Emily Sene, the ground-breaking collector of Sephardi music working with her immigrant Jewish community in Los Angeles in the 1950s and ‘60s. Born in Edirne in 1911 and immigrating to the United States with her oud-playing husband in 1928, Sene began her collection project by seeking out-of-print 78 RPM records of Turkish and Sephardi Jewish popular music from friends and community members, creating mixtapes on a reel-to-reel tape recorder in the days before reissues of this music were available. Later, she began making her own field recordings, focusing on her husband and his friends in their multi-ethnic scene of musicians drawn from Ottoman minority ethnic communities in LA. Sene’s project addressed an audience of one—they were made purely for her own pleasure and to sustain the memory of her community. Sene’s project addressed a deep well of nostalgia, highlighting multi-ethnic music making and blurring out the histories of violence that had marked the end of the old Empires.
Sene’s mixtapes bear a strong resemblance to the releases on Canary Records; indeed, many of the same artists collected on Sene’s tapes also are featured on Nagoski’s label. Sene’s project collects sounds of a lost world, preserved for a future that she did not directly concern herself with. In contrast, Nagoski’s collection, while driven by a similar personal impulse towards musical aesthetics and obsession with history, is characterized by its address to an audience and its accessibility to anyone in the world.
Recently Nagoski was tapped by the Jewish Museum of Maryland to curate a multimedia exhibit. Nagoski chose works from his collection that highlight the musics and lives of Arabic, Greek and Ladino speaking Jews and their experience of immigration to the United States. The exhibit and collection of records presented range from 1916-1969. This time frame encompasses the three major periods of the recording of music of immigrant communities in the United States. 1908 marks the advent of “ethnic” record departments by major labels such as Victor and Columbia which aggressively recorded and marketed records in languages other than English. These niche markets were dropped precipitously in 1929 with the stock market crash and subsequent Depression. From around 1932-1941, the major labels resumed their outreach to the immigrant market, usually by licensing records made in Europe and the Middle East, rather than by recording artists in American recording studios. The recording industry contracted again during WWII, but the decades immediately following the war witnessed the efflorescence of immigrant community-based small record labels. Jewish artists participated prominently in the era of “ethnic records” marketed towards the post-Ottoman communities, Greeks, Turks and Armenians, as well as on records of Ladino song. This exhibit will offer a welcome opportunity for a Jewish institution to benefit from Nagoski’s collection and open the possibility of raising the profile of fluidity and porousness between identity groups as productive features of the Jewish musical experience.
What is exciting about Canary Records and Nagoski’s project, beyond the manifold pleasures of the music he collects and curates, is the tactile and sensuous glimpse his work provides of musical archives as a form of activity in the world. His reissue albums open up a counter history of modern life in which artists outside of the mainstream are granted a central role, and the affective labor they performed is recognized as constitutive to the communities they served. The archive of old records is a conduit to a history of American life that takes seriously immigrant communities and how they are given shape by listening practices. In turn, contemporary listeners (who may not identify with the groups represented) are encouraged to make the music live again as a form of aesthetic experience, but one that holds an invitation towards ethical contemplation.
Sprinkled into the account of his work that Nagoski shared with me was the outline of a politic that emerges from his work with immigrant musical memory. This politic can be articulated as three primary values that he articulated: 1. Advocacy for the value of immigrant music as a constitutive element in American culture; 2. Resistance to the post-industrial devaluation of material culture; and 3. An ethos of sensitivity to the vulnerability of those who have been deemed valueless in the current economic regime—a broad category that sweeps up in its cold embrace many communities, but especially urban people of color and white working class men. Nagoski persistently witnesses these two demographics that have been hit most aggressively by the opioid epidemic in his community. As Nagoski put it, the staggering number of opioid deaths that occur in Baltimore “don’t happen without someone deciding that this is OK.” Nagoski referred to himself as “part of the Trump demographic. People who have been sold one bill of goods and then given something else.”
But rather than turning to nativism in response to the alienation of the contemporary economy and culture struggle, Nagoski’s view of American history has been reoriented towards a history of community centered on the immigrant experience. The precise pathway between the post-Ottoman world and the outsider arts scene that Nagoski operates in is circuitous, abstract and suggests the outline of a science fiction narrative, or a utopian impulse. I see in Nagoski’s project, like Sene’s mixtapes, a belief that the sociality of post-Ottoman music making by minority musicians in America offers a hopeful (if somewhat hazy) political model. In this vision, old “ethnic” records and the artists who made them are exemplars of community organization. Their music rejects political violence associated with identity politics and instead opens up a discussion of shared needs, as symbolized by the sociality that music uniquely provides—structuring community and providing the language of memory that gives life its mythic powers.
Works Cited/Further Reading
Harout Arakelian, Harout Kezelian, Ian Nagoski, Zabelle Panosian: I Am Servant of Your Voice (Baltimore: Canary Records, 2022).
Maureen Jackson, Mixing Musics: Turkish Jewry and the Urban Landscape of a Sacred Song (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2013).
Liz Ohanesian, “Canary Records Preserves Sounds from Early 20th Century American Immigrant Communities,” Bandcamp Daily (January 07, 2021). https://daily.bandcamp.com/label-profile/canary-records-label-profile Emily Sene’s Sephardic Mixtape
Simone Salmon, “Emily Sene’s Sephardic Mixtape,” 100 Years of Sephardic Los Angeles (2023). https://sephardiclosangeles.org/portfolios/emily-senes-sephardic-mixtape/
Edwin Seroussi, “Archivists of Memory: Written Folksong Collections of Twentieth-Century Sephardi Women,” in Tullia Magrini, ed., Music and Gender: Perspectives from the Mediterranean (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 195-214.
Brandon Soderberg, “Ian Nagoski’s Music is for the Birds,” Bandcamp Daily (September 9, 2016). https://daily.bandcamp.com/features/ian-nagoski-interview