Cree Records

Cree Records was founded in spring 2013 around the big wooden table in the Bear Family farmyard, somewhere in the barren wastes of the North German Plain between Hamburg and Bremen. This new record label is a subsidiary of Bear Family and, of course, its founder Richard Weize. Since 1975, Richard has been putting out lavishly packaged complete re-issues of records by the musicians he admired as a youth - not with an eye to making a fast buck, but because he's obsessed with music. Bear Family Records now enjoys a solid reputation as one of the world's top quality re-issue labels and has received numerous awards. Weize himself admits: “I'm a collector and I'm crazy.“ Proof of the level of his insanity is his gigantic archive, which contains over 40,000 vinyl records and master tapes. Regardless of musical genre - country, folk, rhythm & blues or calypso - whenever Bear Family mastermind Richard Weize gets his hands on an interesting musical idea, he puts his heart and soul into uncovering old master tapes and photographic material, he conducts interviews, contacts experts and sorts out the licencing deals necessary for re-issuing the recordings in question. For his uncompromising box sets he was awarded the "Echo Prize for special services to music" in 2009, and in 2012 he received a Grammy nomination for the box set "The Bristol Sessions – The Big Bang Of Country Music".

As time goes by, more and more people from all areas of music are finding their way to Bear Family and Richard Weize. They have exciting new goodies in their backpacks, but these often lie outside the limits of the classic Bear Family repertoire. In order to provide an outlet for other ideas, in spring 2013 Weize and cohort Merten Kaatz founded Cree Records - thereby extending Bear Family's musical range and its pool of contributors. Bear Family generally takes care of the first seventy years of the previous century, whereas Cree Records have now grabbed the sounds from the 1960s and up into the 21st century. Whether selecting reggae or ska, '70s and '80s soul, rare grooves or forgotten top sellers, Cree Records always have more of an eye for the dancefloor than Bear Family Records.