Strata Records (4)

A precursor to New York’s Strata East, Detroit's Strata Records was founded in the late 1960s by former Blue Note artist Kenny Cox. Starting life as a music-led community organisation, coffee shop, studio and live venue, Strata released only a few titles as a record label, gaining it a cult following among record collectors and jazz lovers all over the globe. A testament to the defance local artists showed toward the urban decay and social unrest around them at the time, Strata was run passionately on a shoestring budget. The iconic, minimalist black and white artwork’s aesthetic derived from attempts to reduce printing costs; unreleased music has ended up sitting on studio tapes for decades because the label’s owners simply ran out of money. Stumbling across Lyman Woodard’s Strata album ‘Saturday Night Special’ while trading records, BBE artist Amir Abdullah aka DJ Amir became intrigued by this most mysterious of labels, so he travelled to Detroit to find out more. While working on the Scion iQ Museum project to document the history of the label and its artwork, Amir befriended Barbara Cox, widow of Strata founder Kenny Cox, who granted him exclusive rights to the label’s entire catalogue which has been reissued since 2016 on his own label 180 Proof Records via BBE.