Editor’s note: This is part of The Know’s series, Staff Favorites. Each week, we give our opinions on the best that Colorado has to offer for dining, shopping, entertainment, outdoor activities and more. (We’ll also let you in on some hidden gems.)
I’m impressed by physical spaces that can gather sub-sections of music lovers together and encourage them to share that music with others.
is that rare place for DJs and record collectors, especially those seeking used soul, funk, hip-hop and jazz vinyl. That’s a unique set of stock among record stores in Denver. Many of the selections available at the shop, at 1255 Delaware St., are full of rhythm and groove and are begging to be heard out loud in public.
I should know. I’m a DJ.
I won’t tell you where I spin, nor what my stage name is. It’s not my full-time job, after all. I play vinyl occasionally, in bars mostly, late into the night. A lot of that music is rap and R&B from the 1990s and early 2000s. Recollect has entire sections dedicated to these periods. Shelves are separated by albums and DJ-friendly 12-inch singles.
Other spots in the ample showroom offer international records broken down by region and genre, like gospel, rock, folk, reggae and electronic music. Except for the budget bins, the pricing is dependent on the market, which values rarity and quality. At Recollect, one can find a perfectly acceptable copy of a 1970s soul record for $15, a Venezuelan music compilation for $7, and a treasured jazz album for over $100.
“We try to have a little bit of something for everything,” owner Austin Matthews told The Denver Post in 2017, a year after opening the shop. “We try to carry more obscure, rare stuff. You might find stuff in our store that you can’t find elsewhere.”
Recollect is a clean and airy store. (There is even hand sanitizer on the checkout counter.) The records are kept in clear plastic sleeves in neat browsing racks that extend up, down and across the shop.
Cheaper records are stacked underneath the main racks and at the end of the aisles. Records in an adjoining room in the back are $3 each.
Small shops like this — offering curated, used records for reasonable prices — can sometimes be modest to a fault. Recollect is open for a limited time each week, and it lacks a storefront sign that would make it more identifiable for passersby and other record collectors.
Despite all my obsessive record browsing, I had not visited Recollect until earlier this month, when I accompanied a friend who was looking to grab some music for a gig at a local listening bar that night. Once inside, the daylight gleaming in from the windows and bebop coming from the shop speakers cast me in my element.
When I wasn’t ducking into the Latin records, I was crouching away from view, flipping for bargain dance tracks. After scanning the hip-hop records, I veered over to the front of the shop, where the 7-inch “45s” are kept in thick white boxes labeled alphabetically by genre.
For $35, I came home with records in the aforementioned sections, including Quincy Jones’ album “You’ve Got It Bad Girl” (the one sampled by the Pharcyde in “Passin’ Me By”); a Giorgio Moroder track from 1985; and a spoken-word recording about the history of communications released in 1964 by Smithsonian Folkways, the recording label of the Smithsonian Institution. Later, I dropped $2 more on a 7-inch of Roberta Flack’s “Gone Away” I found by the entry.
I can’t wait to play these records to a crowd, to get their reaction when they catch a groove that had gone silent for a moment, however brief or long that music was resting in the crates. Denver’s residents deserve these kinds of experiences, ones that feed a love for musical discovery and exploration.
Recollect Records is open Thursday through Sunday from 12 to 5 p.m. The shop is celebrating its 10th anniversary on Saturday, April 18, with an in-store show featuring Queens rapper Large Professor, one of several events that record stores are holding as part of the national Record Store Day promotion.
