written by Vince Patricola for DEQ and thedetroitilove.com

What separates good music talent from exceptional? A big part is understanding your musical past and how it grows through your production and sets. As attention spans get shorter, patience grows thinner, the need for fame grows larger and technology enables, the urge to skip steps is tempting. But ask yourself, is it worth it?

In a city rich in music talent like Detroit, renowned artists rub shoulders like it’s no big deal. DJ Brian Bonds once said to me “in Detroit, iron sharpens iron.” It’s passion. It’s competitive. Sometimes friendly and sometimes not. It’s like a renaissance daily.

DJ Mike “Agent X” Clark said “being great means you have to understand and be ready to play all styles of music whether you are a musician or DJ. One way talent is no fun.” Clark is one of those guys who can play jazz, disco, Italo, classic R&B and house in one DJ set and it will all make sense.

It is a big deal in development to have quality record stores to dig in. Record stores are more than records in bins. Detroit is and always has been fortunate in this regard. Many times the owners/staff are careful buyers and are treasure troves of knowledge about the music business as well as records they stock.

Enter percussionist, DJ, writer, vinyl guru (and more) Ben Hall who recently opened his brick and mortar record store in the Brightmoor area (on the West Side of Detroit) called Circle Game Detroit. His encyclopedic memory combined with his nose for finding the hot records (especially jazz and avant garde) was his routine well before it was fashionable to do so and the world was at fingertips. His passion, hard work ethic, high energy and years of experience in businesses has brought him to this happy point in his life and is achieving worldwide attention.

VP: Hi Ben! Thanks for taking the time to do this interview! I just gotta ask. Where does your incredible drive come from? Was there a record or track that made you decide that this was the direction you wanted to go in?

BH: I just love seeing the things in the world. Like a lot of people in Detroit, Mojo took better care of me and showed me way more than my parents did. So just knowing as a kid that there are all these voices out there always makes me wanna look for it, dig it up, hear it, share it. I mean the best gift we can give is helping other people deliver their vision.

VP: You picked a location still in Detroit, but still is a bit of a trek from downtown. There are a lot of musician families out your way. Did that enter into consideration? Is it easier to find people with records there?

BH: For sure. I mean Kenny (Dixon Jr.) lives right over there, Norm Talley there, Ron English… all kinds of heavy Detroit gospel folks. But for me I always wanted to have a job where I could walk to work and really be in a neighborhood. No extra car note, no expensive ass Michigan insurance, just real mellow neighborhood shit. We sell records at the farmer’s market in Rosedale. We just wanted to keep it real local.

VP: It’s definitely worth the drive with the absolute rare heat on the walls (check the IG posts.) Do you feel your thirty plus years of networking and owning businesses like Russell Street Deli has added to the way you run the store?

 

BH: I mean at that point I bought and sold several businesses. I started a bunch that frittered out or were just flat dumb ideas. One of the businesses I sold was Hello Records which was the most hoodrat, guerrilla record enterprise, running out of dope fronts, houses, basically record trap shit. That was until I set the brick and mortar in 2008, which I then sold to my man Wade (Kergan) in 2012 with the sale being finalized in 2014. That version of Hello (Records) gave me enough to buy the restaurant. My vegan soup company was up to almost 200 stores when we sold. I say that to say this. I’ve had a lot of opportunities to make mistakes and ideally not repeat them. Circle Game is definitely the most chill biz I’ve owned because I’m not being totally raw and guerrilla. On the other hand, I don’t have a 10K a week payroll bearing down on me every Monday morning and that pushing my decisions.

 

My job at the shop is not sales, it’s preservation. I have to find the material before it gets destroyed and place it with other preservationists, which is a kinder way to identify someone we’d otherwise call a collector, which has a kind of shitty ring, like tax collector, bill collector. Anyway, if we aren’t efficient as a business then there’s less opportunity for preservation.

 

VP: Speaking of Russell Street Deli, were you there when Matt Chicoine (Recloose) put his demo tape in between two pieces of bread and put it in Carl Craig’s takeout bag?

BH: I was off that day but I did get Matt the job. We actually did our first vinyl release together on Liquid Sky if you remember that label. It was me, him, Stuart Bogie, and Colin Stetson. I was always deep off into records so I had all the records. The Carl (Craig) part of that story is that Hannah (his ex) used to work at Honest Jon’s (restaurant/bar) and connected me with some people who then connected me with some people so I had a lot of international heads coming through the crib to buy way before cell phones and email.

VP: Circle Game is a thoughtful shop with not a lot of filler by design. What is your store/buying philosophy? I know the shop is heavy on jazz. Is that the focus?

BH: A lot of that has to do with time. I used to be back and forth to Vermont and NYC a ton when I was at school and later as a professor. I would stop at every rando ass spot, just finding weird shit and local shit and occasionally serious heat. Discogs of course fucks that up. Makes it easier for the casual buyer, “I think I want this…” Click, it’s yours. Discogs makes it way harder to have the kind of epiphany experience that used to happen a lot with a record that is a sleeper or barely known. Anyway, back to time, who the fuck has the time to sift through garbage? If I go into one more shop where Herb Alpert or Al Hirt is in the jazz section I will lose all my shit.

VP: Your store is also much bigger than the brick and mortar, reaching clients worldwide (like Gilles Peterson.) Can you elaborate on your relationship?

photo (Gilles Peterson, Jesse Cory of 1XRun and Spot Lite Detroit)

BH: Gilles has been that dude for a while as we all know, decades actually. Jesse (Cory) from Spotlite brought him in. Then Echo Posse, my band with Marcus Elliott and Jaribu Shahid, was on the BBC a week later. My homies from Goianas in Brazil, whose cassette I released on my Ornette Coleman Fiend Club label, was all over his Worldwide show, not the BBC because of length I think. There are some people who are just filled with enthusiasm and want to share not just what they are enthusiastic about but also share their enthusiasm. He’s been kind enough to play a dozen plus things I play on or produce in the last year, which is a really great little imprimatur because that dude is first and foremost a music lover not any kind of networker or bullshitter. He’s pure music. People who are pure music, high on enthusiasm and sharing are the exact folks Circle Game is designed for.

VP: How do you feel the records in your store apply to DJs/musicians with an electronic music focus? Do you ever hear a section of a song and say someone should make a house track out of this or a hip hop track?

BH: Well we have a lot of young guns in the shop. Billy Winters and Ameera, who have a great night on Wednesday at Cafe Sous Terre, are in a lot, especially Billy, and he uses A LOT of stuff out of the shop in sets and for production. J. Rawls was in again last week, DJ 3000, Norm, I mean if you got ears you can hear it. We get some house and techno, a fair amount of 12s but these youngins are craven because they’ve never seen a Street Player or yellow label Sharevari out in the world.

VP: How can people keep up with you and your music shows or/and sell you records?

BH- I’m on IG @bbbenhalll and the shop is @circle_game_detroit

to check out the digital version of the Movement Guide go to: www.thedetroitilove.com