El Suprimo Records is a Treasure Trove of Vinyl in Fells Point

Descend the stairs from Aliceanna Street into the basement shop of Fells Point’s El Suprimo Records and you’ll quickly feel like you’ve entered not so much a record store as an archive, which indeed you have. As many as 7,000 records fill the tiny space, which is 10-by-12 feet at most.

The center is a maze of stacks reaching toward the ceiling, itself decorated by discs like a vinyl version of the tin ceilings that still top many bars in the neighborhood. Bins fill both sides of the shop, divided into genres, with radios and speakers and other sonic paraphernalia jigsawed in between more records. So many records.

In the back, owner Jack Moore spins tunes on a turntable all but hidden by more stacks—John Coltrane, The Talking Heads, P.J. Harvey, Philippe Besombes, Henry Mancini, Chet Baker, Lalo Schifrin, Max Roach. One could go on.

“I’ve always loved music,” says Moore, “ever since I was, like, crawling on my hands and knees, just fascinated by it.”

Moore, 59, a Baltimore native and University of Maryland alum—where he did college radio—is a jack-of-all-trades, so to speak. He’s run the shop for nearly a quarter century—23 years this month—has his own record label, plays in bands, is writing a book, and does DJing gigs across town, notably at the Greyhound Tavern, Idle Hour, and Ottobar.

Recently, he’s been taking his setup across the street to The Wren, the year-old pub run by chef Will Mester, his wife, Millie Powell, and barkeep Adam Estes. That’s because Mester, a vinyl collector who sources records for both himself and the turntable under his bar, asked Moore to come over on Monday nights, when the acclaimed restaurant is otherwise closed, to play music for whomever happened by for a pint.

So Moore makes the yards-long trek once a month to DJ what he calls the Fells Point Troglodyte Ornithological Society Listening Party, where he’ll set up his turntable on the long wooden bar by the front door, or, on winter nights, near the fireplace in the backroom, usually used for darts.

Since this past August, the listening party has drawn neighbors and hospitality-industry folk to pull up a chair and listen to Moore’s playlist, which is mostly folk, acoustic folk, folk pysch (which Moore describes as “electrified European folk music”), and—as the party’s name promises—the occasional bird songs. The bird songs are on LPs, says Moore, and the society’s jokey name is drawn from the pub itself, troglodyte being a reference to the scientific name of wrens, which belong to the troglodytinae family, so named for being “cave dwellers.”

“I do bring records with bird songs, and once or twice during the night, I will mix in a little bird song melody before I play the next song,” says Moore.

“It’s a fun thing to do, to use the bar when it’s closed,” says Estes one night as he expertly pulls a Guinness from the taps at The Wren. “You get a lot of locals in here for it,” he continues, swinging aside a curtain at the corner of the bar—revealing the house turntable and a stack of vinyl underneath.

Back at El Suprimo, Moore points to the 45-disc sleeve he’d made for the Society that he displays to advertise the listening parties. It showcases a Michelangelo-inspired songbird on the front, a list of the tunes he’s prone to spinning—John Fahey, Tawny Owl, Nymphs & Satyrs—on the back.

His shop is a listening party all itself, minus the beer and whiskey. He has, he says, 14,000 more records at home, as well as a self-built record cleaner at the shop. It’s an ultrasonic 40-kilowat water-bath machine that he fashioned with the help of a shish-kabob skewer and a rotisserie motor.

“A big part of the business is restoring,” he says, playing a rare Coltrane LP that he recently fixed.

His nights at The Wren are not about the restoration of records, necessarily, but of the restoration of community, of listening, of attention. And, yes, of a few pints and a few birds.