When one thinks of legendary Chicago-based record labels over the years, its jazz and blues companies often come to mind. And yet, with one of the country’s oldest and most reputable symphony orchestras, Chicago had been a mecca for recording firsts virtually since the dawn of the industry. Some of the earliest acoustic recordings were made here nearly a century ago, some of the first electrical recordings, the earliest high fidelity, the first stereo recordings, even early digital recordings, all within the classical genre. In 1989, then-University of Chicago law school student James Ginsburg created Cedille Records, the first Chicago-based classical music label since Mercury Living Presence some thirty years earlier. Ginsburg never did become a lawyer (there are three in his family, including his mother, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg) but he did go on to create a Grammy Award-winning record label internationally known for its consistently high-quality recordings that fill in huge voids of repertoire and boast of imagination and innovation at a time when the industry by and large prefers to play it safe. As compressed and inferior-sound-quality downloads have become the status quo, Cedille bucks that trend by offering its downloads in true full-file CD-level quality bit rates that are twice the size of those sold on most download sites. Recent Cedille releases figure in six just-announced Grammy Award nominations for 2011 and the label shows no sign of slowing down. And while Cedille continues to showcase the best of Chicago classical artists performing underground repertoire by and large neglected by the major labels, its reputation has become such that it is actually bringing artists to Chicago to work with the label.
