“I set out to release music every week, and I’m pretty sure that in the four years we’ve been going, we haven’t missed a single week,” Color Red Music founder and president Eddie Roberts observes with justified pride. “It’s a music discovery idea, where people know that sometimes it’s going to be unknown artists or collaborations. It’s almost like a TV show or a magazine in a way. We say to the listener, ‘We think this is good music’ or ‘We think this collaboration is worth doing.’ That was always the concept and, thankfully, people have engaged in it and really seem to enjoy it.”

Although based in Denver, Color Red has quickly established a global footprint that extends to Japan, Israel, France and Spain. “We’re reaching into these different regions,” Roberts explains, “so that we’re giving people in Seattle exposure to some great Spanish bands. Then, we’re building a community in Spain, so that when we put out a band from Seattle, there are people in Madrid listening to them. We’re growing communities across the world and we’ve seen that kind of snowball effect.”

Roberts has longstanding experience as a community-builder because he’s been nurturing a fanbase since 1999 when he formed the jazz-funk ensemble The New Mastersounds. The guitarist and producer also has a global perspective, as Roberts grew up in Wales, then attended music school in England before relocating to the United States.

In mid-September, The New Mastersounds toured Europe in support of their new release, The Deplar Effect—a two-LP set recorded in Iceland, just days after Eddie Roberts & Friends celebrated the fourth anniversary of Color Red at Denver’s Cervantes Masterpiece Ballroom.

What led you to launch Color Red?

I moved to America in 2010. I lived in San Francisco for three years, then did two years in New Orleans and ended up here in Denver. That’s where I saw this amazing music scene going that nobody was really representing. On any given night there were five or six shows going on around town, between people passing through town and people who were living here. I felt that there was no outlet for it and nobody outside of Denver had a real sense of what was going on here. So that was one initial starting point.

That’s also why it’s called Color Red, which is a reference to Colorado. The name of the state comes from the word that means the color red in Spanish. So that’s where I came up with the name. I thought it was catchy as well. [Laughs.]

I had been involved with the Cooker Records label back in the ‘90s. Then, the Mastersounds put out our first record with a label, where we never saw any reporting or anything. So we were like, “Alright, screw this, let’s start our own label.” Then we started One Note Records and that was the vehicle for releasing Mastersounds records for the next 15-20 years.

So I’d had experience on that side of things before, and obviously, the music business has been changing so rapidly and moving into the digital space. So I wanted to go down that rabbit hole. My initial idea as to how we could make an immediate impact, was to start releasing music every week.

I knew I could produce it quickly, so we set up a studio here in Denver. I basically had the Mastersounds’ backline. I was paying for storage in New Orleans, so I brought it up here, set some mics around it and we made music.

We were going to tape as well. Tape has always been an important part of my production style—that kind of vintage sound—but I didn’t want it to be just a funk label or a funk and jazz label. I wanted it to be non-genre specific—kind of across genres—but using the same techniques of recording and the same kind of branding of the label. I’ve always thought that was very important because I was a huge fan of Blue Note Records, and of course, the iconic sleeve design. So I wanted to have something with a cohesive design style and a cohesive kind of sound, but not necessarily in just one genre.

Had you always been interested in the business side of music or is that a relatively new enthusiasm?

I’ve always loved the business side. For the most part, I’ve managed the Mastersounds and been the band leader. I’m also the main writer, the producer and the management. I used to do some of the booking although I passed that on, but I’ve always really enjoyed the business side of things and I’ve enjoyed being involved in the releasing of music. So I was always kind of doing that but I think the impetus was seeing such a rich scene going on. I was like, “Well, this really needs to be shown to the world.”

Another part of it was that because I’ve been traveling across the world for so many years, I’ve built up so many connections, and I really wanted to set up this kind of a global sharing thing. So we have an outpost in France and one in Spain and one in Japan. We’re also doing something in Israel right now. That was always part of the vision. I knew all these people producing great music and I felt like it was time to join all the dots and start pulling it all together.

There are all these communities of independent musicians and I’m trying to pull that together and start collaborating. I’ve been going and guesting on other people’s records. And, over here, we’ve been mixing people’s records from other countries and growing this independent network that I’ve been so fortunate to be part of for so many years. So it was kind of celebrating the Colorado scene, but then also celebrating other communities to get this collaboration going.

Did the pandemic lead you to recalibrate your approach at Color Red?

We started Color Red in 2018, so we’d already had a couple of years head start before this happened. It certainly wasn’t a reaction to that but it did mean that, suddenly, there were a lot more eyes on the internet. And I think the people who were so used to spending money on going to live shows and traveling to live shows suddenly were more prepared to support music in a different way by buying vinyl or livestreams. We didn’t really go down the livestream route, it didn’t seem like the right thing for us. So we focused more on continuing to produce music and keep the quality and consistency up.

During the first couple of years, it was great because we had so many people who would stop by. We basically built a studio in a house and people would stay at the house. I would see who was coming through—playing the Ogden, playing Cervantes—and these were people I knew, so I’d hit them up and say, “Hey, do you want to stay at the studio house and cut some tracks in the afternoon?” It was working really well, but then, of course, that all dried up when the touring stopped. So there was a little challenge, but luckily, we recorded so much stuff in those first two years that we had at least some back catalog, since we weren’t able to produce much because nobody was moving around the country.

Even now people are reluctant to stay at the studio house. They have more boundaries now, since what happened over the last two years.

So we’re transitioning a little bit more into development and focusing on certain high caliber acts.

While Color Red releases music that touches on a range of genres, your own career has focused on soul, jazz and funk. When you were growing up, was it challenging to find like-minded players and receptive audiences?

I started playing at the age of 10 and got into jazz at around 14. My brother was a couple of years older than me and he started buying vinyl. So we started seeing names that we recognized and began to join the dots. We were more coming from Black Sabbath and Hendrix. When someone would be talking about jazz we were like, “What’s this jazz?” Then we’d go, “Oh, Charlie Parker, I’ve heard that name. So we’d grab that record. It was just kind of exploring, going down the rabbit hole of music. Then, somebody made me a mix tape of the soul jazz Blue Note kind of stuff, and immediately I was like, “Oh, that’s it. That’s the sound that I’m after.”

I don’t know why but everything I do has to have a groove. So something about that music just immediately resonated with me and drew me in, and I started putting bands together.

I went to music school up in Leeds. I was originally from Wales and it was the only non-classical music school in the U.K. at the time. So anyone who was vaguely into jazz and its various forms, gravitated to this one city, Leeds.

I started there and immediately began putting bands together. I think my first band was doing Art Blakey and The Jazz Messengers covers. Then, I moved more into an organ trio. The first record I put out was with The Three Deuces, which was my organ trio back in ‘96. That was the predecessor to the Mastersounds, which started in ‘99.

I first met The Greyboy Allstars in ‘95 because when they came to Europe, their first show was in Leeds. I opened for them with The Three Deuces. This was at the club where we used to play regularly—a bunch of DJs ran it. They were making me mix tapes—“Oh, you should check this out.” That’s how I discovered the Greyboy album West Coast Boogaloo. We were super excited to have them come and play Leeds, and I was really excited to open for them.

I remember them walking in while we were soundchecking and their jaws kind of dropped, like “What the hell? People are playing funky boogaloo in Leeds?” They were so shocked and they didn’t know what was going on. We immediately became friends. In fact, the first Mastersounds show in America was opening for the Greyboys at the House of Blues in Chicago in 2004 and that was kind of a direct link from meeting them back in ‘95 where they were like, “Oh, I remember these guys. Let’s let ‘em open for us.” That was our first break in America.

For some reason there was this scene in Europe that was led mainly by DJs, that had these acid-jazz nights. That’s why the youth of the U.K. was hearing all this stuff. I remember Lou Donaldson coming over and the Mastersounds backed him up. He had no idea that there was this huge scene of young people into Alligator Boogaloo and things like that. He was blown away. I remember playing a festival in front of a couple of thousand people, and he was like, “What the hell is going on right now?” He didn’t even remember all of those early tunes, he wanted to play jazz. I was like, “No, we’re doing the boogaloo funk stuff.” He was like, “What? Why?” So I told him, “Trust me, this is what the kids like.” It was a very interesting time.

At what point did that European scene start to wane?

I would say the mid-‘90s was the golden era of that acid-jazz movement. By the time I put the Mastersounds together in ‘99, things were beginning to change. I was involved in this club night, and they asked me to put a band together to play every Friday. That’s why I put the Mastersounds together. The first couple of years were good, but by 2002 or 2003, there were more people on stage than in the audience. We were asking ourselves, “What are we doing? What has happened here?” A big cause of that was the licensing, which meant that some places could only stay open until 11 p.m. Then, if you wanted to stay out, you had to pay to get into a club. That generated revenue so the clubs could put on a band. But then, all of a sudden, everything changed and they started giving out 2 a.m. licenses to all the bars. So the bars just started playing compilations. This was the same time when all these funk-soul compilations came out. Suddenly, everyone’s like, “Why would I pay $10 to get into a club when I can just stay drinking in this bar?” And the bars were playing the same music that the DJs were playing at the club, so the bottom dropped out of the whole live music scene in the U.K.

That was right around the time that the Mastersounds started. Then, in 2004, we had an opportunity to play in the US. Those first shows at the House of Blues were like 1,000 people each night. That’s when we said, “Oh, we’ve been in the wrong place all along.” We knew that we’d found our audience. I think we did two shows in 2004 and then in 2005, we came back and did a little West Coast run, played High Sierra and then had an instant audience in California. By 2007 or 2008, we were pretty much exclusively touring the U.S., playing 150-200 shows a year. That carried on until the pandemic hit.

The band is geographically diffuse, which must have complicated the situation for all of you.

It did. I moved out here in 2010 and the rest of the guys are still in Europe. I’m in Denver and Simon [Allen, drums] and Joe [Tatton, keys] are in the U.K., while Pete [Shand, bass] lives on one of the Balearic Spanish Islands off Barcelona, Menorca. So it’s been very difficult trying to get back to it, whereas the rest of the American music scene has managed to do so.

There have been huge problems with us being all over the world. Until November of last year, British citizens couldn’t even enter into the U.S. So we kept having to postpone tours and in the end, it was like, “We just can’t make this work right now.” So we had to pretty much cancel everything, but we did two shows in Menorca. We were like, “Well, if Pete can’t come to us, then at least we’ll go to him.” [Laughs.] We dabbled in NFTs and I did this NFT launch so that people who signed up for the free NFT got to watch the livestream of the show in Menorca, which is going to be one of the only Mastersounds shows this year.

Your latest album was recorded in Iceland. How did that come about?

There’s a club up in Crested Butte that I’ve played a few times that’s got a backer, who owns a bunch of lodges around the world. He approached me just over a year ago because he had this lodge on the north coast of Iceland and he said, “I want to build a studio on this land. Would you help?”

I flew out there last July to see the property. There was a building that used to be a grocery store right on the sea wall. Basically, the next thing you hit is the North Pole. That’s how far north and remote it is. So he was like, “Do you think this will work?” And I said, “Yeah, let’s do it.” I suggested getting the Mastersounds up there because, at the time, the Mastersounds couldn’t come to America. I was like, “This is probably one of the only places we can record right now.”

So we got together for the first time in nearly two years and we pretty much found the gear from places around the world. They had their team build the place out and we sent all the gear over there. Then, the Mastersounds showed up and we were like, “Right, let’s make a record.”

The tape machine didn’t even show up until five days after the band had arrived, that’s how fresh it was. We were basically plugging stuff in and getting it going. The lodge is called Deplar Farm, so the album’s called The Deplar Effect. It’s a play on the words “the Doppler effect” but it is also the effect of being up there in this remote place and the fact that we hadn’t seen each other for two years. It was pretty special. We were there for 10 days and it’s a double album.

How do did you approach writing the material on The Deplar Effect? Did it come together in the studio?

The writing process has kind of always been the same where we bring some vague ideas— scratchy grooves that I’ve sung into my phone or a couple little piano licks that Joe has brought in. We tend not to overwrite things before we get in the studio because we want it to be more impulsive, where everyone is kind of reacting, so it’s not overthought before the record is created. So we have some ideas and things like that, but then we get in the studio and start fleshing them out. Then we lay it down and then move on to the next.

That’s always been our process of writing and there was no difference on this one. Also, Lamar Williams Jr. came out and he sang on half the album. He was on the last album, too. We had our 20- year anniversary tour in 2019 and the Shake It album had just came out on Color Red. We toured that for a little over a year, and then we hadn’t played since then.

So Lamar’s on half the album. It’s half instrumental, half vocal. I love what came of it and I already have such fond memories when I listen back to the tracks. It kind of takes me right back to the north coast of Iceland in November of 2021. There’s an atmosphere to it.

Do you have plans to return to Iceland? What else is on the horizon for Color Red?

I’m definitely doing more music in Iceland. I’ve already done a record with George Porter Jr. in Iceland. That has Robert Walter on keys and Nikki Glaspie on drums. I’m currently in the process of getting guest vocalists to sing on the different songs.

I’m also planning on going out there and making an album with Neal Sugarman from Daptone. So there’s a lot of interesting stuff happening. That’s going to be a collaboration between Icelandic musicians and U.S. musicians, as well as some Europeans because Neal is in Zurich now.

I’m excited about pulling in some of these Iceland guys. There are some amazing players out there who have a great attitude. I hope to keep growing these little pockets of music and collaborating more. As far as touring, I see myself moving into this production and label role more than the heavy touring that the Mastersounds would do.

We’re going to do our Color Red fourth birthday party at Cervantes’ in Denver on Sept. 10. Then, I’ll be in Madrid with the Mastersounds when the album comes out on Sept. 16.

I’m also going to dabble with some more NFT things, which is kind of fun. We’re working with Marc Brownstein’s platform, Lively. It’s just dipping our toe in the water. It’s a fun kind of marketing thing. I’ll always remember hearing somebody talking about the world wide web and one guy was saying, “Oh, this nonsense will never catch on.” I was like, “No, I think it’s something.” It’s foolish to ignore developments in tech and things like that.

Meanwhile, we have a ton of albums coming out on Color Red. Obviously vinyl is a big thing and it’s always been an important medium for me. I love it. I’d say there’s probably going to be about one album a month coming out over the next year and beyond. We actually have a new record press in Europe that we’re going to start using, which means that we won’t have to ship to Europe, now that we can press there.

So we’re going to keep growing and, hopefully, people will stay engaged and get more engaged and we’ll grow our listenership and grow these communities while we continue to make great music. That’s the plan.