Tap Records
c. 1996–2000 completed Co-owner, producer, engineer with Mark de Clive-Lowe
An independent jazz label in 1990s Auckland, run from a Lorne Street apartment, that released the first records of Mark de Clive-Lowe.
Tap Records was an independent jazz label in Auckland in the mid-1990s, co-owned by Dubber and the pianist Mark de Clive-Lowe and run out of Dubber’s apartment on Lorne Street. It existed because Auckland’s young jazz scene of the era, the cappuccino-café circuit of the mid-nineties, was producing musicians faster than anyone was recording them.
The label released de Clive-Lowe’s first two albums, First Thoughts (1996) and Vision (1997), before Universal Jazz picked him up for worldwide release; trumpeter Kim Paterson’s Impending Journey (1997); an album by the group Jazz in the Present Sense; a compilation of artists from the Manifesto Wine Cellar; and Kiwi Jazz Tracks Vol. 1, a compilation that grew out of the radio programme Off The Record. Dubber produced and engineered much of the catalogue himself.
The label ended the way small labels often did: the distributor went bankrupt, the stock went with it, and what Dubber has described as an expensive hobby became a demoralising money pit. Nothing from the catalogue has been re-released since, a fact this archive quietly regrets.
Links
Auckland jazz: the cappuccino years (AudioCulture, by Dubber) ↗Mark de Clive-Lowe at AudioCulture ↗
