COLUMBIA, S.C. - With 50,000 choices, no wonder Graham Drummond was feeling a little overwhelmed.
Drummond, 20, an exchange student from England, made Papa Jazz the last stop on his way out of town.
"There's too much choice," he said, shuffling through a rack of CDs. "I don't know what I want."
Papa Jazz, a small shop packed with a big inventory, has been a fixture in Five Points for 25 years - a music hunter's paradise. With an unpredictable playlist and a collage of sardonic cartoons, photos and articles stuck on the walls, the shop is a musical crossroads for students, baby boomers, musicians and retirees - many of them looking to owner Tim Smith for his take on old titles and new artists.
"Even if he's not a big fan," employee Chris Moseley said, "he'll know something about it."
The shop is on Greene Street, a natural footpath between the University of South Carolina and Five Points.
From the sidewalk, speakers trumpet the musical mood of the clerk behind the counter inside, while the smell of coffee wafts by from the Starbucks around the corner.
Smith, 45, wears jeans and a short-sleeved, button-down shirt. His hair is pulled into a ponytail that's graying. In front of him are thousands of albums and CDs arranged in alphabetical order by artist. He also has DVDs.
Most of the merchandise is used. Customers can trade, get something new for something they're not listening to anymore.
"It's always been a problem," Smith said, "trying to fit it all in."
He grew up in Batesburg-Leesville, but everybody assumes he is from New York City or somewhere, he said.
When he came to work at the store as a 20-year-old USC philosophy major, it was chaos - "a zillion records and almost no order."
He fixed that, but the place still has the feel of a professor's library, overflowing with words and ideas, and is about that small, too. It opened in Five Points in 1980, and Smith bought it in '83.
Every now and then, he gets to hear something he has never heard before. That' s why he got into the business in the first place, he said. He's a jazz fan, and John Coltrane, an avant garde, freeform artist, is his favorite musician.
Once, he got his hands on an original Blue Note recording of jazz sax player Hank Mobley he sold for $3,200. "Blue Note records" - the best jazz label of the '50s and '60s - "are always in demand," he said. "I personally prefer records to CDs for sound quality, but that's not the way of the world."
David Hane has been shopping at Papa Jazz since the mid-1980s and worries that music lovers like Smith might be "a dying breed" in retail. Hane recently left the store with a half-dozen albums, Bob Dylan, Dwight Yoakam and Peter Tosh among them.
"I'm a big vinyl fan," Hane said, slipping them back into a yellow Papa Jazz bag.
Adam Clay, on the other hand, always buys CDs. He comes in about once a week.
"I like to come and look, because I never know what I might find. I might see something I haven't seen in years," Clay said while he checked out the $5 bin.
Moseley, the Internet sales manager, has been working at Papa Jazz for eight years in a college job gone full time. He said new people find the shop every day, and they always seem surprised by how much music fits into such a small space.
"When I first started coming here, I was kind of taken aback. Right now, they're playing R.E.M., but sometimes they'll play the weirdest, freakiest jazz and almost run people out," he said.
But they always seem to come back.
The Augusta Chronicle ©2012 Morris Communications, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Back
