vibing with vinyl
KOCHI: A room filled with vinyl records from The Supremes, The Temptations, Weather Bird, the most famous Jazz duet of Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines, to the Bad by Michael Jackson. Born during the time of CDs and Mp3, the perfectly stacked LPs has caught my awe.
With a warm smile, comes Sujit G Ponoth, the owner of all these records, over 4,000 to be precise, at his music record store — JD’s Jukebox. A result of a hobby he began in 2012. “This is my ancestral home. The collection include records once possessed by my mother and grandfather. And the sale happens online. So I don’t treat this space as a store as such,” says Sujit.
The space is designed by his wife Aiswarya Pradeep Kumar. With paintings of The Beatles, Freddie Mercury, and Ilayaraja adorning the walls, JD’s Jukebox is a music heaven. I spot Carpenters amid the stacks. Sujit’s reluctance to play the record is palpable. “The Carpenters or what Keeravani grew up listening to the sounds of a carpenter working on woods, has a few scratches, it may not come out nice,” he quips.
Instead, he plays one of his favourites — Jazz Connection by Art Blakey and Thelonious Monk. “When you listen to music on vinyl, you hear it the way it was recorded. The analogue sound is more natural and adds depth,” Sujit says.
The uncompressed music is like a warm blanket, unlike the shrillness that comes from a digital version — something new for my millennial self. “Holding the record, cleaning it, and placing the needle... It’s a different feeling. Also, with records, music becomes tangible. You can look, appreciate, and listen,” he adds.
With jazz in the background, his current favourite genre, and a grin on his face, Sujit explains the beginning of JD’s Jukebox — named after the women who inspired him. When Covid hit, like everyone Sujit too had an ample amount of time in hand and he took up the task of cataloguing his LP collection. “That’s when I found out that I had multiple copies of a few albums. So I decided to put them out for sale on Instagram. After I received some responses, the takers were from Bengaluru and Kolkata and not Kerala, I realised that records have a demand. That’s how JD’s Jukebox was formed,” says Sujit.
“Before that, I was part of voluntary work during the flood in 2018. There I saw how people, irrespective of religion or politics came together before the hartals hit. Though a calamity could hold people together for some time, music is a solid unifying factor that transcends all boundaries. Anyone can bond over music. Through JD’s Jukebox, I just want people to know music,” says Sujit.
On social media, Sujit also provides a review of each LP. Every physical copy is graded according to quality.
Classical to Boney M
Sujit owns an eclectic collection — from jazz, disco, techno, pop, and metal to rock and classical music — something instilled in him by his mother. “Since childhood, music has been my companion and that’s because of my mother. She used to learn classical music at home. After her class, she would be jamming to Micheal Jackson and Boney M to Bappi Lahiri, Usha Uthup and Ilayaraja. I was amazed by her choices, it was like a collision of many worlds. And that continued throughout,” says Sujit.
However, as cassettes and CDs flooded the market, vinyl records didn’t pique young Sujit. “After the 80s, with the emergence of cassettes and CDs, record stores became a thing of the past. My love for LPs started when I left India, they are much more common abroad,” says Sujit.
Now globally, LPs have overtaken CDs abroad, just behind online streaming. And all you need is a record player, which is easily available online. Sujit claims that Kerala once had an interest in records. Since they take up a lot of space in a house, people began to discard them.
From scrap to warehouses in Cambodia
“A lot of my collections are sourced out of my endless walks to warehouses and godowns, where they were abandoned mindlessly. From Jew Town in Kochi to Kozhikode, Mumbai, Bengaluru, and even Cambodia, I travelled in search of records, holding many in my hands, to show people for reference,” says Sujit.
Sourcing from the mess meant a lot of cleaning. When dust gets into the microscopic zigzags on records, music would sound bad. So he used to sit and clean them using paraben-free soap and distilled water. “Now I have the proper equipment for the task,” he adds.
Sujit has even struck gold from the mess many times like the one by George Michael. “There is a culture associated with this called crate digging. A literal treasure hunt. I got a couple of LPs like that. My travel to Cambodia has helped me get one — pictured disc, which was a rare and expensive kind of record, from an unorganised pile of George Michael collections,” says Sujit. Aside from the 4,000 plus collections, around 500 are his personal stash. “Not for sale,” he reminds me.
Music through thick and thin
Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, Eric Clapton’s Journeyman, Dead or Alive’s Youthquake, and the discography of Italian artist Giorgio Moroder are part of his collections neatly stacked according to the genre in separate boxes.
“I got familiar with these many artists and their works slowly,” says Sujit. For the love of music, he even got baptised when he was 17. “I was in Switzerland at the time. After my part-time work, my colleagues used to visit a church. The first time I went there because I didn’t know many places and didn’t own a vehicle. But what made me stay was the choir bands. I started visiting the church daily and the officials thought I was a believer. So when they asked, I was ready to be baptised.”
Now he is intriguingly taking stock of the shift in people’s music preferences. “My motto is ‘live and let live with music’. There’s no need to bash other’s likings. Just because it is not of your interest, doesn’t mean they aren’t good,” says Sujit.
Instagram:@jd_s_jukebox