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Monday, May 21, 2007

SF Chronicle Feature - Six Degrees Records

Working for Six Degrees Records has been an amazing experience - touring with artists and learning the inner-workings of a successful independent label. Below is a feature on the label that I pitched and placed in the SF Chronicle.

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SURVIVAL OF THE HIPPEST

Sunday, May 20, 2007

No one told Bob Duskis and Pat Berry it would be easy when they launched their world music label, Six Degrees Records, in 1996. On the other hand, no one told them it would mean surviving a corporate takeover of their parent label, overcoming a dot-com boom that went bust and took much of San Francisco's venture capital with it, weathering a terrorist attack that pushed the economy into a slump and, most recently, maneuvering through music's shift to a digital format and the resulting bankruptcy of several record-store chains -- including Six Degrees' primary distributor.

So if someone had told Duskis and Berry what they were in for when they released their first CD 10 years ago, would they have reconsidered their decision to start an independent label?

"Of course not," says Berry. "But I won't deny we've had our struggles. We've been through every up and down you can imagine."

Duskis just laughs.

Seated in their Potrero Hill office, surrounded by mountains of half-opened boxes of CDs, the two alterna-magnates don't look as if they've been struggling. Maybe their winning formula includes the ability to look calm amid chaos, be it a landslide of new product or another impending market catastrophe. Or maybe, after a decade of riding the music business from brick-and-mortar stores to iTunes, through surge and slump, they have simply learned to chill.

This month, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of its first CD, and its survival in an era that's killed more than one local label, Six Degrees has released "Backspin," a compilation featuring label artists covering their favorite songs, from the Real Tuesday Weld's version of "The Day Before You Came" by Abba to the New Delhi band MIDIval PunditZ's retooling of Led Zeppelin's "Four Sticks," a song that was itself an homage to Indian music.

Such circular chains of influence underscore Six Degrees' transglobal aesthetic and illustrate its motto: "Everything is closer than you think." The label's roster certainly looks like a genre-crossing, borderless musical exchange: Talvin Singh and others in the Asian Massive movement mix traditional Indian sounds with digital dance beats; Issa Bagayogo does the same with his hybrid of classical Mali music and postmodern grooves. The Bay Area's DJ Cheb i Sabbah puts a new, danceable spin on the folk music of his native Algeria, and Bebel Gilberto has transformed Brazilian music with her fusion of grassroots and groundbreaking sounds.

Just as their artists blend disparate traditions, Duskis and Berry run their label with a fusion of idealism and pragmatism. While they take risks on eclectic and unorthodox artists, they also license their more accessible music for films and television commercials. They've also made sure Six Degrees is at the forefront of the move to online distribution, including being the first independent label featured on iTunes.

"We said to ourselves that we could piss and moan about how the business was changing, or we could look ahead to new opportunities, embrace them and try to be one step ahead," Duskis says. "We can't compete with major labels when it comes to spending huge amounts of money on videos or paying radio stations to play our things, but we can be faster moving, more forward thinking and try to anticipate trends."

Duskis and Berry met while working at Windham Hill Records, San Francisco's jazz and New Age label. After discovering that they shared a love for the same types of music and a vision for how that music should be marketed, they decided to make the jump to their own label. There the cutting-edge music coming out of countries like India could be spotlighted in its own right, rather than "borrowed" to spice up Western electronica with an exotic sample.

"We wondered, 'What would it be like if producers from Rio and Mali were mixing these things up?' " Duskis recalls. "So that's what we went for, and we found hybridized bands like the MIDIval PunditZ, who grew up steeped in traditional Indian music like ragas, but were also club kids who loved the Chemical Brothers, hip-hop and trance. Their music is almost a perfect 50-50 blend of both of these aesthetics. It's not some guy in England bringing in a sitar sample; it's a natural, fully formed extension of where these kids are coming from."

Six Degrees began as a subsidiary of Island Records, where Duskis and Berry also helped market Island's more avant-garde acts. The marriage lasted two years until, on the eve of Universal Records' takeover and subsequent purge of Island, Duskis and Berry wisely packed up their master recordings and fled.

It was 1998, the dot-com boom was going strong, and soon the two struck a deal with a Bay Area venture-capital company. They hired local illustrators to design colorful CD artwork that went on to become a Six Degrees signature. When the boom broke, the label was rescued by its first hit album, Gilberto's "Tanto Tempo." Released in 2000, the CD eventually sold more than a million units worldwide -- peanuts for Viacom, but pure gold for a small independent.

"The album was right for the time," says Berry. "It had elements of music from the past, but also this new electronic sound that really took it to the future. We saw the opportunity, and as soon as the record started selling, we got Bebel on tour around the country. I remember our head of marketing coming in and yelling at me, 'You had the booking agent book her at Bimbo's? It's gonna be completely empty!' And then, the day of the show, it sold out. The same thing happened in New York, at a venue they thought was too big for us. That's when we knew we had something."

Fast-forward to 2007, when all is well in the world of Six Degrees. Gilberto's new album, "Momento," looks set to repeat the success of "Tanto Tempo." This year will also see Six Degrees' first contribution to Starbucks' Hear Music Debut series, featuring the Brazilian singer-songwriter CéU, and the launch of a digital-only Emerging Artists Series.

Duskis would like to see Six Degrees continue its expansion for another 10 years, and he doesn't necessarily think "commercial" is a dirty word: "We've never treated this music like it's some kind of strange niche that only a few ethnomusicologists will like, and I think we've opened a lot of people's ears and broken a lot of preconceived notions of what world music is. There's a huge amount of Brazilian electronica that exists today solely because of Bebel's success. Same thing with the Asian underground. We were the first label to really embrace it, and it's everywhere now. Hey, we'll take credit for a little bit of that.

"Oh, and not to sound hokey," he adds, sounding hokey, "but we're really proud to be a Bay Area label. In terms of a vital, open-minded music scene and a progressive, internationally flavored city, this is the place."

So it's official: Local is the new global. And the beat goes on.

E-mail Neva Chonin at nchonin@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page PK - 40 of the San Francisco Chronicle