I can't recall when. Late noughties, maybe the early tens? I'd recently bought an album online from their store, and signed up to recieve emails. Every Friday without fail, Trunk records would deliver a message to my inbox.
Label owner Jonny would post an obscure album, nearly always by an arist or artists I was unaware of. Singers, groups, straights, middle of the roaders, the freaks and the beatniks.
Cost, 50p an album. Flac, mp3, you chose.
Other than that there were no rules, just music that Jonny thought deserved to be heard.
He'd post a little review. He'd big it up. He would tell you in what would become his usual mix of the comic and serious - you need to hear this.
Most of the time I'd pay my 50p, download the files and forget about them.
A little later. Maybe it was a midlife crisis, maybe it was the boredom of where I was at in my usual listening habits. Maybe I'd read something somewhere that had peaked my interest (this definitely happened with, to my mind at the time, the loathsome Frank Sinatra). Maybe it was the fact that the SD card I used to store these files was full and needed attention, or maybe it was a combination of all these things. It doesn't matter now. What really matters is when I delved into those mp3 files, stars aligned.
From in amongst the candy coloured pink shark fin of exotica, the space-age bachelor pad lounge music, the soundtracks, the spoken word, and whatever else was tickling the fancy of Trunk Towers, albums emerged.
Helen Merrill, Pinky Winters, Barbara Lea, Joanie Sommers, alongside the more familiar Cleo Laine, Mark Murphy and Tony Bennett. This wasn't just jazz, this was vocal jazz. And it sung to me.
