Low-Budget, High-Concept : Tiny newcomer Mesa/Bluemoon aims its recordings at baby boomers and college students

Stacks of unopened records, tapes and CDs littered the narrow corridor of the Burbank office suite.

“Welcome to promo hell,” said Jim Snowden, president of Mesa/Bluemoon Recordings, as he supervised the mailing of new recordings to radio stations and retail stores nationwide. “At a big label, this is done in a big mail room. We don’t have a big mail room.”

Mesa/Bluemoon doesn’t have any mail room. It doesn’t have fancy offices with state-of-the-art furniture. Leave that to Capitol, CBS and the other major labels.

Mesa/Bluemoon’s mission is strictly low-budget, high-concept: to infiltrate what company executives perceive as the growing jazz and adult contemporary market for old and new releases.

Formed in June as a joint venture with Rhino Records in Santa Monica, which primarily handles reissues, the new label aims to attract Baby Boomers with changing tastes--former rock addicts who are switching to jazz, new age and other genres. The company signs its own artists and releases material recorded by performers at other small labels.

Both Columbia and Polygram reported last year that jazz reissues did extremely well. Columbia announced that it shipped more than 1.25 million units (compact disks, LPs and cassettes) of the four dozen albums in its Jazz Masterpieces reissue series.

“I see the definition of adult contemporary encompassing so much more in the future,” said a company spokesman. “As Yuppies get older, the definition will broaden to include more jazz and even world-beat music, and we want to tap into that.”

At the same time, the company hopes to capture college students. Howard Alston, national director of promotions for Mesa/Bluemoon, said disc jockeys at college radio stations have frequently played songs distributed by Mesa/Bluemoon. “This music is being looked at deeper than before. College audiences are more educated and well-rounded.”

But Scott Byron, editor of College Media Journal in Long Island, New York, a biweekly magazine covering campus radio stations, said that although jazz and adult contemporary music remains a “significant part of their programming,” he spots no trend in that direction. “There’s a misconception that college kids all like this stuff. They don’t.”

Will the two audiences--baby boomers and college students--generate financial success? Snowden bravely predicts that with about 140 releases by the end of 1990, the label should reap a “six-figure” net profit, although he concedes jazz and adult contemporary sales don’t approach the commercial popularity of rock ‘n’ roll and probably never will.

Most jazz artists, he said, sell about 10,000 to 20,000 albums, while many prominent performers don’t crack the 100,000 barrier. “It’s hard to get those kind of high numbers unless you are dealing with rock ‘n’ roll.”

Snowden, 36, is undaunted by the challenge. He prides himself on carving a career apart from major label experience. “Things are so segmented at a major label. You can’t get a well-rounded education, and I like being in control of the environment.”

He eventually wants total control.

“Since I was 15, I’ve wanted to be the president of a major record label,” he said, “and there’s no reason to stop now.”

In the last decade, Snowden has helped launch five music-related companies: Eastern Pacific Sounds, JNS Enterprises, Zebra Records, the P.A.R.A.S. Group and Passport Jazz. Eastern Pacific and Passport were record labels.

After Passport filed for protection under Chapter 11 bankruptcy law earlier this year, Snowden was contacted by Richard Foos, president of Rhino Records, about forming a new label. Foos said Rhino was interested in finding a company to distribute anthologies of jazz and new age recordings. “We had done that with rock but not with jazz,” Foos said. “The idea was to reissue some of an artist’s best work.”

Rhino then subsidized half of the starting costs for Mesa/Bluemoon--about $250,000--and Snowden and investors put up the other half. They will split the profits down the middle.

So far, besides releasing its own material, Mesa/Bluemoon has distributed recording acts signed by Enja and Gramavision--two established jazz labels. Among the releases are the last recordings of late jazz trumpeter/vocalist Chet Baker; the new album from guitarist/composer Leni Stern, and “Full Moon Dancer” from the jazz ensemble Urban Earth.

Foos said Mesa/Bluemoon doesn’t need to reach huge audiences to be successful. “We’re looking for a loyal, solid audience, not someone who will buy our albums and decide the next week they like heavy metal.”

The numbers can wait, though. Snowden and his staff of about a dozen must first negotiate the daily demands of running a new company. Already, in three months, several employees have left because of disagreements with Snowden over insurance policies and job responsibilities.

Snowden expected problems. “Because we’re a new company without a lot of money, we can’t hire people with lots of experience. So you never know how someone is going to work out until you see them in the job.”

The 5 p.m. deadline was getting closer. Piles of records and tapes still had to be loaded onto the pickup truck and delivered to the post office.

“We have to do this once a month,” said Snowden, as he lifted boxes onto the truck. “Because we’re a small company, we have to prove ourselves quickly. We don’t want to make mistakes.”