(Htfd Courant)- As the jazz-addicted proprietor of Integrity 'n Music, the ruggedly independent, Mom and Pop, customer-friendly, jazz and blues record shop in Wethersfield, Ed Krech is celebrating his store's 40th anniversary, grateful to be around so long but apprehensive about how much longer he can keep his shop afloat. Besides being his dream job and a good way to provide a living for his family, Krech (rhymes with Breck) can also celebrate the fact that his cozy, compact shop, with its bargain prices, unpretentious decor and pleasantly low-key sense of hipness, has become a vital part of the social fabric that makes the Greater Hartford jazz community seem so distinctive and such an independent cultural phenomenon.
Presenting live jazz in a record shop is an idea that Krech borrowed
from the New Orleans record stores he haunts — along with scouting out
Crescent City book shops — when he and Nancy, without fail, make their
annual pilgrimage to The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. As
hooked as he first became on jazz as a trumpet-playing teenager growing
up in South Bend, Ind., just two miles from Notre Dame, he's become, in
middle-age, wholly addicted to everything about New Orleans, absorbing
all he can about the Crescent City's music, its culture, cuisine,
literature, folk lore, history and even its small, homey book and record
shops rooted in local tradition. (Read More)
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