The shoestring nature of most independent record labels means they can be pretty erratic in their release schedules–the money to put out the next record often isn’t there until the previous one pays for itself. But even that doesn’t adequately explain the 25-year gap between releases for The Sirens Records, a local indie specializing in Chicago blues and boogie-woogie piano music.
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His obsession with boogie-woogie piano was sparked by Helfer’s performance at the University of Chicago Folk Festival in the early 70s. Dolins, then a high school student in Skokie, contacted the pianist and began taking lessons from him. “I sort of idolized him,” he says. Like his idol Dolins ended up studying at Tulane University in New Orleans, where he spent his spare time soaking up the sounds of Professor Longhair and James Booker and, through Helfer’s connections, meeting legends like Roosevelt Sykes and Tuts Washington. He started The Sirens in the summer of 1975, after his freshman year.
“I didn’t care for the business aspect of it and I lost interest,” he says. “I was trying to figure out what to do with my life.” He earned his bachelor’s degree in physics and a master’s in computer science at Tulane, then moved to Dallas, where he worked in a Texas Instruments research lab and earned his doctorate at the University of Texas in Arlington. In 1989 he moved back to the Chicago area, where his future wife, Judy, lived. He taught at the University of Wisconsin, worked at ACNielsen, and eventually landed at Hitachi, commuting to the Bay Area to serve as chief researcher in an IT lab. After he was laid off in April 2000, the company found him a consulting position in Chicago, but that fall his entire division was eliminated, and he was out of work.
This year Dolins has added a few more items to The Sirens’ catalog, including a reissue of Heavy Timbre with previously unreleased bonus tracks and a new blues-piano summit called 8 Hands on 88 Keys, with Helfer, Detroit Junior, Pinetop Perkins, and relative newcomer Barrelhouse Chuck, whose newest full-length the label will release next month. Dolins, who’s accepted a teaching job at Bradley University in Peoria for the fall, says he would love to release recordings by other blues pianists, but he admits he’s chosen to focus on a tradition that has few expert proponents left. “I just don’t know how many more CDs I’ll be able to put out,” he says.
