Newport Classic - 11 Willow Street, Newport, RI 02840

The Pied Piper of Newport
By CHANNING GRAY
Providence Journal Bulletin Arts Writer

Larry Kraman works out of a tiny lair in the eaves of his Newport condo, an old schoolhouse with a rooftop deck that has a view of Newport Harbor. The cramped space is just big enough for a computer, piano and exercise bike.

It's also home to what Kraman calls the ``strangest record company in the world'' -- Newport Classic. This is the label that has given us such enduring classics as Concerto for Orchestra, Chainsaw and Cow and that put out the world's first overnight CD, recorded live one summer night at the Newport Music Festival and on store shelves the following day.

Newport Classic also made headlines when it recorded the piano music of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Kraman concedes the music was pretty bad, but there's still a twinkle in his eye when he recalls the spreads he got in The New York Times, Time and Newsweek.

Not all that comes from Newport Classic is kooky, however.

Mixed in with the oddball releases are mainstream recordings of substance. Stereo Review singled out the label's Beethoven piano concertos as one of the 10 best recordings of 1988. Two years later, Newport Classic made Time magazine's 10-best list with an Irving Berlin album.

"I've always found the quality very high,'' says Newhouse Newspapers critic Byron Belt.

"Certainly, Newport has put out a lot of stuff no one else has wanted to bother with.''

But Kraman's greatest hit might just be pulling the company out of the financial fire. Two years ago, Newport Classic, which he runs with his wife, Shelley, was $500,000 in the hole, facing an ailing classical music market and close to closing.

"We were at the point,'' said Shelley, "where we'd dive under a vending machine to get a nickel. We had this partner who was getting ready to foreclose on our lives.''

But in the shrewdest move of his hustling life, Kraman struck a deal with Sony and landing a job with the record giant as vice president of international product development.

He spent 17 months tooling around New York in limos, eating sushi flown in from Japan and finding that no one was particularly interested in what he had to say.

"It was kind of like Green Acres in reverse,'' he said.

Then his boss was fired and Kraman got the ax, too. As he puts it, they buried King Tut and put him in the tomb along with him.

Now, after taxes and paying off his debts, Kraman is back in Newport and out with what may be his hottest disk to date -- a version of The Nutcracker arranged by the Boston-based klezmer band Shirim. Klezmer is the nasally sounding music that is traditional to Eastern European Jews.

Kraman has put out a promotional poster for the CD that reads: "Only and Obviously on Newport Classic.''

"One day I was a schnook, the next I was a genius,'' he says. "Now, I'm back being a struggling schnook.

Kraman says he's not exactly on easy street, but you'd hardly know it.

He and Shelley live and work out of a stunning apartment carved from the upper floors of an 1860s schoolhouse twice featured in Architectural Digest. The developer gutted the space, then filled it with a maze of pastel-colored alleyways that lead to balconies and spill into cubbies and cubicles.

Advances in technology have made it possible for the couple to run the business from their home, getting information on new releases out on their Web site (www.newportclassic.com).

The other day Kraman, trim and tightly wound, got a call from someone peddling a tape of piano music by an idiot-savant ex-slave known as Blind Tom, who toured the country like a sideshow freak in the 1860s. The project, Kraman agrees, has Newport Classic written all over it.

In between calls, he and Shelley drop in at the neighborhood health club, take cruises around the harbor and stroll over to the Rhumb Line for lunch.

But at 51, Kraman isn't about to settle for a life of shuffleboard.

"I don't have to hustle as much,'' he said, curled up on the living room couch with Shelley and Spike, their white pound cat, "but the hunger is still there.''

Indeed, he has spent the past couple of weeks on the West Coast, dropping in on record stores and schmoozing with DJs, trying to get them interested in the latest from Newport Classic. At this, he is a virtuoso.

`Still a road warrior'

Kraman has always been a people person, which is probably why he felt out of place at Sony, where decisions are made by corporate types in board rooms far removed from the trenches.
But he can name the record stores in this country with wall space big enough for a poster, and he sees first-hand the piles of CDs on critics' desks that are still in the cellophane wrappers.

That's why his newest release comes in an envelope with a sticker that proclaims: "Your Klezmer Nutcracker Has Arrived.''

"I'm still a road warrior,'' he says. "I still love going to stations and hearing them play our CDs while I'm driving off in the car.''

It wasn't until he and Shelley, 48, started Newport Classic a decade ago that Kraman realized he was born to sell. Careers in sales were frowned upon when he was a middle-class Jew growing up in Brooklyn. Better you should be a doctor.

But once he hit the road, he realized he had the gift.

Kraman knew he couldn't compete with the major labels when he recorded Camille Saint-Saens's popular Organ Symphony, so he went with a limited, numbered edition on a gold CD.

"People were fighting over it in Taiwan to get the lowest numbers,'' he recalled, "and they were paying $100 a pop in Singapore.''

But his greatest marketing stunt was putting out that overnight CD. The recording was made at an evening concert at the Newport Music Festival, edited backstage at The Breakers, then driven in the wee hours to a CD plant in southern Maine. Technicians were on hand when a bleary-eyed Kraman wheeled into the parking lot at dawn.

By early afternoon the disks were coming off the presses, allowing him time enough to race back to Rhode Island, shower, and be at The Breakers by intermission, selling CDs of the previous night's concert.

The yin to his yang

Kraman says Newport Classic would never have survived without Shelley to pay the bills and act as a counterbalance to his off-the-wall schemes. They met while students at Brooklyn College, at a frat party.

Larry invited Shelley out for a spin in his Triumph sports car, jumped a light and got broadsided. She spent the next four days in the hospital.

"It was a great way to meet her parents,'' he said....Hi, I'm the guy who just tried to kill your daughter."

Kraman, who was studying music at the time, dropped out of college for a while to work as a recording engineer for the music department. That led to work producing records and writing music for jingles. He even did the soundtrack for a porno flick that played at the Pussy Cat Theater in New York.

"It was the only time anyone ever spelled my name right. Everyone else in the movie gave fake names like Bill Smith and John White. But there I was on the marquee, Lawrence J. Kraman.''

After a series of dead-end jobs, Kraman came to Providence in the early 1980s to work for the defunct Sine Qua Non label. He soon left to start Newport Classic, which he and Shelley ran out of a former firehouse in the West End of Providence.

Shelley manned the office; Larry took care of everything else. Their first recording was of Bach organ music. Kraman recalls standing at the tape console yelling, "Take One,'' dashing into the organ loft to pull stops, then running back to the console for "Take Two.''

From the beginning, the label had a yen for the offbeat, in part because that's the music Kraman has always liked. He also knew he could never put out Beethoven symphonies and compete with the big boys at London and Deutsche Grammophon, so he went instead with attention-grabbing offerings like the Nietzche piano music and neglected scores like Goldmark's Rustic Wedding Symphony , an impressive work the major labels had ignored.

"We'd throw it on the wall and see what stuck,'' he said.

Right now, Kraman has no doubt that his klezmer Nutcracker album is going to stick big time.

Klezmer Nutcracker Shirim can be heard at listening posts in record outlets across the country, he said, and he feels it has a good chance of making the Billboard charts; Tower Records in Boston sold out all its copies last week.

The first sign Kraman had a hit came when he called Mark Swed, the critic at the Los Angeles Times, and asked if he could drop by and chat about the CD while he was on his swing along the West Coast. Swed told him he'd already gone out and bought it.

"When was the last time you heard of a critic buying a CD?'' Kraman exclaimed.

'Still a road warrior'

Plans for sequels are already rattling about in Kraman's brain, maybe a Klezmer Goes to the Movies disk featuring the theme from Titanic sung in Yiddish.

"Right now, standard, full-price repertoire is doornail dead,'' Kraman said, "unless you have a star like Yo-Yo Ma or Cecilia Bartoli.''

So Newport Classic has just come out with a string of unusual operas from regional houses, including the first recording of Rhode Island-born composer Henry Mollicone's Coyote Tales , as well as the first recording of Gian Carlo Menotti's comic opera, Help, Help the Globolinks!
Other recent offerings from Newport Classic, which put out about 25 titles last year, include an arrangement of Stravinsky's Firebird Suite for pedal steel guitar, and Peter Schickele's spoof of the Wild West, Hornsmoke .

Out of those two dozen releases, perhaps five will do well.

At this point, Kraman is starting to wonder how long he can schlep around the country with a backpack full of CDs, cajoling critics and DJs. More and more, he's beginning to think about that electronic keyboard in his office and maybe getting back to composing.

"Hey,'' he says, "I own a record company. If other people can put out crap, why can't I put out my own crap?''