Though Kallman's favorite artists are Van Morrison and Joan Armatrading, he's just as jazzed showing off a Jean-Jacques Perry album of Moog music, a vintage Art Ensemble of Chicago album, or We're the Banana Splits; he'll know the song listing, the producers, and every bit of arcana about the making of the record.

Ever the D.J., Kallman sets album after album onto his $6,000 Linn turntable (this major purveyor of CDs is one of the diehards who believe in the superiority of vinyl); soon there are albums and jackets spread all over his couch. Though ambivalent about the vogue for fashioning new hits by sampling old ones, he has a bag of records put aside for future possible sampling. "People were stealing stuff way back when," he says. "You can't knock Puffy Combs, because you'd also have to knock great artists who did their own little bits of lifting."

Kallman gets most animated when showing off his extensive collection of early flops by artists who later became superstars, including Attilla, a duo featuring Billy Joel; Gulliver, with lead singer Daryl Hall; Milkwood, the first group of the Cars' Ric Ocasek; World Class Wrecking Crew, featuring Dr. Dre in a red lamé suit; Babyface's first group, the Deal; and Steely Dan's precursor, The Original Soundtrack. Though there is hardly a memorable musical moment among them, Kallman says he often puts them on "as an exercise. You listen and go, 'Would I have known?' "

Kallman's drivenness isn't limited to business pursuits. He first spotted Isabel when she was a Columbia student moonlighting as a dancer in a video for a Big Beat band; he dogged her for a year -- lying to get past the switchboard where she worked, bombarding her with books and attention -- until she consented to a date.

After the band Big Wreck played a major-label showcase in Toronto, recalls the band's lead singer, Ian Thornley, "Craig was in the dressing room before we were. The other labels were waiting for us to come and mingle." Kallman's two assistants wearily recount how they come in early only to find a half-dozen messages from him. This relentlessness can be exhausting and annoying at times, but Kallman's saving grace, says Arthur Spivak, who manages Tori Amos and Collective Soul and speaks to Kallman almost daily, is that "Craig never gets carried away with himself like some people in this business. He's always self-deprecating: 'I know I'm neurotic, but that's what makes me tick.' "

Considering how much time he spends in the office, Kallman hasn't done much to give the place warmth. There are some worn suede couches and a lot of clutter -- dat tapes of unsigned acts and producers, trade publications, posters, gold records, CDs. As the day progresses, he'll suck cough drops and chew gum -- his only vices -- while ricocheting from phone call to meeting. He often orders two lunches so he can eat one later for dinner.

At one point during the making of Brandy's Never Say Never, Kallman, wearing an untucked suede shirt and slacks, met with two young R&B producers, Silky and Teron, in an attempt to sharpen an up-tempo track. "We want to make it hard and street," Kallman was saying. "Janet and Mariah's new records are just a loop of someone else -- I think it's wide open for Brandy to take them out. When she starts really singing, it's hot, that's dope."

When they leave, Kallman seems a little deflated. "Most of the kids who come to my office can't play, can't write music or read a song, but they're 'producers,' " he says. "Gamble and Huff, Holland-Dozier-Holland were songwriters as well as producers. It's gotten cheaper to buy equipment, easier to sample other people's music. Fewer and fewer artists are coming to my office saying, 'Hey, I got this new song; I just played all the instruments and I wrote it at the piano.' " Kallman bemoans the trend, yet he's a pragmatist. "I'm not pooh-poohing it," he says -- but then does: "Unfortunately, it's the wave of the future."

In fact, it's precisely the ease with which an R&B hit can be manufactured (compared with, say, developing a rock band) that led Kallman to form the house-music label Big Beat. Kallman says he finds his rep as a black-music specialist "ironic, because I was much more into rock for many of my formative years."

His musical fanaticism started when he was a child, and Kallman's father, Stanley, at the time an attorney for Cannon Films, started bringing him along to shows -- Gilbert & Sullivan operettas, rock and jazz performances. (Kallman is an only child; his parents divorced when he was young, and his mother died when he was 5.) After trying nearly every musical instrument and failing miserably, Craig started collecting records. His taste was wholly conventional: The first six groups he bought were Fleetwood Mac, Bad Company, Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin, Parliament/Funkadelic, and Hot Tuna. He'd pore over the albums, wondering why some songs were weak, why radio didn't seem to pick the right singles.

By the time he'd become a teenager, he was a club kid and budding ethnomusicologist. Trinity classmate Elizabeth Saltzman, now fashion director of Vanity Fair, recalls, "Craig was way straighter than I was yet had this incredible knowledge. I'd find him and say, 'Do you know this song?' and hum a few notes, and he'd bring me all the remixes and import versions. He was interested in the music, not the scene."