Maestro of the Secret Museum: a bargain=basement record collection holds a priceless heritage

Natural History, June, 1997 by Mark Jacobson

Attired in a baggy black T-shirt, purple velour shorts, and fluffy blue slippers, the curator of the Secret Museum appears at the screen door of his ranch house in Long Island and squints into the foggy gloom of the suburban afternoon. It is a little early for Pat Conte, noted collector of ethnic music and "world traveler who's never been anywhere -- except Canada, for ten minutes." The caffeine level hasn't yet peaked in his decidedly hefty body, nor has he smoked enough cigarettes, so he feels "like crap." But then again, Conte, a man with a fierce sense of beauty, is always a bit out of sorts in the "ugly world."

This isn't to say that Conte, who's in his early forties and wears his graying hippie hair in a haphazard ponytail, is particularly distressed to be living in the midst of "Wrong" Island's National Enquirer belt, habitat to serial killers, Satanists, and such notables as Amy Fisher and Joey Buttafuoco. "It's a cultural wasteland, but so what," shrugs Conte. "When you're a hermit, it doesn't matter where you live." Indeed, Conte is happy enough to share his smallish house with his aged mother (a friendly woman and big Sarah Vaughn fan) and his younger brother. He doesn't even mind working in the post office, as he has for the past decade -- first sorting letters until it drove him "nuts" and now as "a slob mail handler" -- because for Pat Conte, the "beautiful world" is in the basement.

"Welcome to the Secret Museum," Conte says, with a sudden burst of sly, sonorous pride as we walk down the dozen or so steps. First stop on the exhibition tour is the Guitar Wing, located behind the washing machine. Conte's got everything from the first electric guitar" -- a 1931 Rickenbacker, one of only nine ever made -- to mandolins made from coffee cans. A formidable guitarist, Conte has long played as one of the Otis Brothers, a "blues and preblues" band, which put out an album with a cover drawn by R. Crumb. A walk around the supporting beam leads us to the Book Wing, containing several thousand neatly filed rare books, many snagged from thrift store stacks. These include several accounts of assaults on the North Pole and an extensive library of early Christian and mystery cult literature.

Then, after a cursory glance at fifty or so real and replica animal and human skulls (some nailed to the wall Heart of Darkness style) and assorted dinosaur bones (a nifty Stegosaurus back plate is prominently displayed), we arrive at the heart of the museum, Conte's 10,000-plus 78-rpm records. Some date back more than eighty years; few are newer than the early 1950s. Accumulated over decades from garage sales and Salvation Army shops, Conte's collection of vintage records from the world over is certainly among the largest, and most eclectic, of its type.

It is from these 78s that Conte has assembled his series of CDs (four so far), The Secret Museum of Mankind -- Ethnic Music Classics: 1925-48 (on the Yazoo label). Inspired by one of Conte's favorite books, also called The Secret Museum of Mankind -- a famously hoary but endlessly engrossing pastiche of hand-tinted postcards and doctored National Geographic photographs detailing world exotica circa 1930 -- Conte's aural Secret Museum is a grand document of folk anthropology.

The disks bounce from country to country, continent to continent, decade to decade in a seemingly random way that will rattle the more anal enthnomusicologist. One moment we're in Nigeria, in 1930, and the Eleja Choir is singing a churchy "jubilee." A moment later, it's Sardinia of the mid-1940s to hear the rousing launeddas, or Sardinian triple reed pipes, of local hero Effisio Melis. Then on to Camden, New Jersey, in 1928, where Russian guitarist Savelli Walevitch warbles that old chestnut "The Many Wonders of the Steppes." Rolling from Ceylonese street music, Rajahstani drones, Cuban son, and Romanian quartets to the Vietnamese ban nhac (small orchestra), Macedonian wedding feasts, and a lullaby from the Society Islands, the time-space juxtapositions come hot and heavy.

No selection lasts longer than three or four minutes (typically enough, Conte offers no specific timing on the individual cuts). Some pieces, like the "Mbube" by Solomon Linda's Original Evening Birds (recorded in South Africa in 1939), sound familiar, which makes sense because the tune is the basis for the Tokens' radio hit of 1961, "The Lion Sleeps Tonight." Other selections, such as an anonymous 1920s piece from Laos, played on the khaen -- a giant mouth organ containing sixteen reed pipes -- might as well have arrived in a pneumatic tube from a destroyed planet.

We're witness to what Conte calls "phono-archeology," and we come to trust his taste to guide us through the labyrinth. (An occasional deejay, Conte has played his 78s on public radio stations for years under the rubric "Secret Museum of the Air.") One after another -- whether they be A. Mirzeva's canny vocal over the swirling horns of a Samarkand-based orchestra, A. Dobrohotov's amazing balalaika workout on the 1928 recording of Kamarinskaya (both on vol. 3), or Professor Narayanrao's devotional singing from India (vol. 2) -- masterpieces emerge from the scratchy surface noise, a whole world of music you didn't even know existed.