Sam “The Record Man” Sniderman, 92, died Sunday, September 23, 2012. In many ways his is an all-Toronto story: born in the city, he grew up in Kensington Market and attended Harbord Collegiate. Most notably, he built his downtown Yonge Street record store into a virtual neon icon to the record, with its dual LP-shaped marquee of coloured rotating flashing lights. It defined recorded music retail for several generations of Toronto music lovers.

Let’s be clear, Sniderman was more than a mere retailer. A crucial promoter of Canadian records, his accomplishments garnered him the Order of Canada in 1976. Later he was made an inductee of the Canadian Music Industry Hall of Fame, the Canadian Country Music Hall of Fame and in 1999 was presented with the Ramon John Hnatyshyn Award for Voluntarism in the Performing Arts.

Sniderman’s death also reminds us of another passing: that of the record store, that physical, tactile medium of music exchange. Upon reflection I learned much about music of all kinds at Sam the Record Man (often reduced to Sam’s by his faithful customers), and I hope he made a tidy profit from my abiding love of recorded sound which teetered on obsession.

I first recall going to Sam’s with my father, a jazz lover. He bought an Ellington LP on that outing, previewing it on the store record player. It was the first time I’d heard Take the A Train. Far for being a shattering musical revelation, to my youthful avant-gardist ears it sounded very unhip, like easy-listening elevator music - remember MUZAK? Now I like to think I know better, and perhaps I do.

Whenever I had a few dollars in my pocket, I’d scratch my record itch by going down to Sams’ (and often to A & A Records, a few doors down). I figure I received an undergrad music education equivalent spending several decades on the recorded repertoire of the human race there, first on 45s and 33 LPs (‘60s to the late ‘80s), then on cassette and finally on CD.

How to describe my typical Sam’s experience? There was the thrill of the hunt, certainly. Flipping expectantly through the racks, getting my fingers dirty, was something like visiting a tactile, gritty Youtube before the internet, but with a much higher likelihood of bumping into not only music both known and unknown but also fellow music geeks. Another bonus: the promise of a much higher sonic and textual fidelity than Youtube heard over my scrappy computer speakers. There was ultimately the sweet satisfaction of possession, of finally putting “my” album into my home stereo and cranking up the volume. That was also an era when liner notes were often as not stylishly written and illustrated, an integral and important part of the album package. I still can’t bear to trash my LP copies of the Bärenreiter UNESCO Collection of Traditional Music of the World, with their large B&W photos and erudite notes.

Later, when my performances and music began to be released on commercial LP (Jon Hassell, Evergreen Club Gamelan) and a little later on CD, I’d make the trek to Sam’s second floor. It seemed important to me that “the product” was racked properly (in the front) and re-ordered if sold out. And yes, I even indulged in the guilty pleasure of the neophyte record artist: monitoring unit sales, like an anxious parent watching his baby’s first tentative steps. In retrospect, it was my way of engaging with fellow local music fans, and also of standing in a long line of recording artists whom I admired. My Sam’s visits, which started as a modest music fan and consumer, had modulated to that of an anxious but equally modest producer, each of which was, I realised, an essential side of the production-consumption coin.

At the time the word on the street was that the approachable Sniderman freely gave his expert advice and even invested in emerging Canadian musicians’ first recordings. Brian Robertson, a close Sniderman family friend and past chairman of the Canadian Recording Industry Association noted, “He was a mentor to literally hundreds of Canadian artists and musicians, and the Yonge St. record store and Sam’s presence there was the centre of the Canadian music industry’s universe for over three decades.”

Music retail went through a sea change in the 1990s, a process apparently as yet unfinished. Sniderman filed for bankruptcy and closed his store in December 2001. While he retired, his sons Bobby and Jason re-opened the store the following year, yet the losses kept accumulating. In 2007 they sold the Toronto Sam the Record Man property to Ryerson University and the building was demolished. Ryerson plans a new student centre in its stead.

End of story? Toronto forgets yet another landmark part of its cultural history? Not quite. There are evidently future plans for the old Sam’s neon sign. As a triple tribute to the physical record, to “Sam the Man” and to the store he built to serve music fans, it will fittingly be rehung, taking pride of place in the new Ryerson building.

David Perlman talks with Josh Grossman, artistic director of the TD Toronto Downtown Jazz Festival.

To hear the full conversation with Daniel Taylor click the play button below. For any of our other podcasts, search for “The WholeNote” in your favourite podcast app, or go to TheWholeNote.com/podcasts for the entire list.

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David Perlman talks with Roman Borys of the Gryphon Trio and Artistic Director of the Ottawa Chamber Music Festival.

To hear the full conversation with Roman Borys click the play button below. For any of our other podcasts, search for “The WholeNote” in your favourite podcast app, or go to TheWholeNote.com/podcasts for the entire list.

Or click here to download the podcast. (Right click and "Save as..." if it's playing directly in your browser.)

Robert Wilson’s and Philip Glass’s seminal opera, Einstein on the Beach, made its triumphant Canadian debut Friday at the Sony Centre in a production that defies convention to this day, 36 years after its first performance. Filled with contemporary 1970s pop culture references from Patty Hearst to Mr. Bojangles to a list of NYC radio station WABC deejays, Einstein is both a timeless piece about time and a spacious piece about space.

Two days before opening night in a fascinating panel that uniquely chronicled the work’s origins by the three principal creators – dancer/choreographer Lucinda Childs is the third -- Wilson said its inspiration was “20th century god Albert Einstein.”  He explained that long duration plays always interested him – the production runs 4 hour and 20 minutes  -- and that he saw opera as an expression of its Latin origin “works” as in “including all the arts.”

Einstein comprises four acts and five brief  “Knee” connective interludes (Wilson calls them “close-ups”) and runs without intermission. The audience is welcome to come and go as it pleases. (Curiously, no one in the row I was in near the back of the Sony Centre’s main floor left their seats during the entire performance – except to stand at its conclusion.) The current production is the fourth since 1976 and the first since 1992. I was fortunate to attend the second at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1984, a mesmerizing experience as I recall. Based on that memory and recordings from the 1970s and 1992, this Luminato incarnation is indisputably the most musically proficient of the lot.

Wilson’s conceptual starting point for the opera, he explained at the panel, was a classical structure -- a theme and variations built around three images (a train, a trial and a field that would host a space machine). This solid foundation enables each scene’s individual elasticity to flourish. Wilson advised his audience not to look for meaning but to just get lost in it, quoting Susan Sontag: “To experience something is a way of thinking.”

Yet, Wilson did reveal that “On the Beach” alludes to the atomic bomb (specifically to the impending nuclear holocaust in Nevil Shute’s novel of the same name), that the train image is there because Einstein liked trains and that the lines of light, which slowly move in a myriad of ways throughout the opera, refer to time and space.

Wilson, trained as an architect, kept a notebook filled with drawings which were his ideas for Einstein’s visual content. When Glass came to compose the score at the piano he kept Wilson’s notebook in front of him. “The music came easily,” Glass said, attributing Einstein’s continued freshness after more than three decades to its being unlike any of their other collaborations.  “It’s sui generis,” he said.

Einstein appears in several guises throughout the work, as a young chalk-wielding theoretical physicist and as a sailing afficionado, for example, but most memorably as a violinist wearing what was (apart from the Beatles’ mop tops) arguably the most iconic hairstyle of the mid-20th century. The wig was worn by the prodigious Jennifer Koh (who played Spring and Summer from Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons with the TSO in March as part of a “What Makes It Great” concert).

In an impressive evening filled with time-bending stagecraft, energetic dancing that seemed to embody the “E” in Einstein’s most famous equation and unparallelled musicianship from soloists, chorus and instrumentalists led by Michael Riesman, Ms. Koh’s vibrant playing ranged from her forceful impeccably phrased repetitive cycles of notes -- a touchstone of much of the opera -- to the warmth of the haunting second theme in Knee 4.  

Two days earlier at the panel, Glass explained that the violin becomes a touchstone since the most important thing for a musician was that Einstein played the violin. As to why many of the lyrics consisted of solfege syllables (doh re mi) and numbers, Glass recalled that it started as a teaching device to get the singers used to his idiosyncratic tone palette and complex time signatures. Wilson happened to walk in on a rehearsal and expressed his pleasure with the “lyrics”.  Glass kept them, the result of “my clumsiness and Bob’s naivete.”

Two more standouts in Friday’s performance were Andrew Sterman’s compelling tenor saxophone solo in Act 4, Scene 1 which soared Gato Barbieri-like as twenty-one people moved onto the stage individually or in pairs, stop-frame style and Kate Moran whose rendition of  “Prematurely Air-Conditioned Supermarket” elevated Lucinda Childs’s eight lines of Laurie Anderson-like seemingly trivial consumerist insights into high performance art. That most of it was delivered while lying on a bed in front of a judge in the second trial scene (Act 3, Scene 1) only made it more remarkable. It was my personal show-stopping moment.

By Paul Ennis

Robert Wilson’s and Philip Glass’s seminal opera, Einstein on the Beach, made its triumphant Canadian debut Friday at the Sony Centre in a production that defies convention to this day, 36 years after its first performance. Filled with contemporary 1970s pop culture references from Patty Hearst to Mr. Bojangles to a list of NYC radio station WABC deejays, Einstein is both a timeless piece about time and a spacious piece about space.

Two days before opening night in a fascinating panel that uniquely chronicled the work’s origins by the three principal creators – dancer/choreographer Lucinda Childs is the third -- Wilson said its inspiration was “20^th century god Albert Einstein.”  He explained that long duration plays always interested him – the production runs 4 hour and 20 minutes  -- and that he saw opera as an expression of its Latin origin “works” as in “including all the arts.”

Einstein comprises four acts and five brief  “Knee” connective interludes (Wilson calls them “close-ups”) and runs without intermission. The audience is welcome to come and go as it pleases. (Curiously, no one in the row I was in near the back of the Sony Centre’s main floor left their seats during the entire performance – except to stand at its conclusion.) The current production is the fourth since 1976 and the first since 1992. I was fortunate to attend the second at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1984, a mesmerizing experience as I recall. Based on that memory and recordings from the 1970s and 1992, this Luminato incarnation is indisputably the most musically proficient of the lot.

Wilson’s conceptual starting point for the opera, he explained at the panel, was a classical structure -- a theme and variations built around three images (a train, a trial and a field that would host a space machine). This solid foundation enables each scene’s individual elasticity to flourish. Wilson advised his audience not to look for meaning but to just get lost in it, quoting Susan Sontag: “To experience something is a way of thinking.”

Yet, Wilson did reveal that “On the Beach” alludes to the atomic bomb (specifically to the impending nuclear holocaust in Nevil Shute’s novel of the same name), that the train image is there because Einstein liked trains and that the lines of light, which slowly move in a myriad of ways throughout the opera, refer to time and space.

Wilson, trained as an architect, kept a notebook filled with drawings which were his ideas for Einstein’s visual content. When Glass came to compose the score at the piano he kept Wilson’s notebook in front of him. “The music came easily,” Glass said, attributing Einstein’s continued freshness after more than three decades to its being unlike any of their other collaborations.  “It’s sui generis,” he said.

Einstein appears in several guises throughout the work, as a young chalk-wielding theoretical physicist and as a sailing afficionado, for example, but most memorably as a violinist wearing what was (apart from the Beatles’ mop tops) arguably the most iconic hairstyle of the mid-20^th century. The wig was worn by the prodigious Jennifer Koh (who played Spring and Summer from Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons with the TSO in March as part of a “What Makes It Great” concert).

In an impressive evening filled with time-bending stagecraft, energetic dancing that seemed to embody the “E” in Einstein’s most famous equation and unparallelled musicianship from soloists, chorus and instrumentalists led by Michael Riesman, Ms. Koh’s vibrant playing ranged from her forceful impeccably phrased repetitive cycles of notes -- a touchstone of much of the opera -- to the warmth of the haunting second theme in Knee 4.

Two days earlier at the panel, Glass explained that the violin becomes a touchstone since the most important thing for a musician was that Einstein played the violin. As to why many of the lyrics consisted of solfege syllables (doh re mi) and numbers, Glass recalled that it started as a teaching device to get the singers used to his idiosyncratic tone palette and complex time signatures. Wilson happened to walk in on a rehearsal and expressed his pleasure with the “lyrics”.  Glass kept them, the result of “my clumsiness and Bob’s naivete.”

Two more standouts in Friday’s performance were Andrew Sterman’s compelling tenor saxophone solo in Act 4, Scene 1 which soared Gato Barbieri-like as twenty-one people moved onto the stage individually or in pairs, stop-frame style and Kate Moran whose rendition of  “Prematurely Air-Conditioned Supermarket” elevated Lucinda Childs’s eight lines of Laurie Anderson-like seemingly trivial consumerist insights into high performance art. That most of it was delivered while lying on a bed in front of a judge in the second trial scene (Act 3, Scene 1) only made it more remarkable. It was my personal show-stopping moment.