While Manhattan was in the throes of the COVID-19 shutdown during 2020, renowned photographer, recording engineer, label head and lifelong jazz advocate Jimmy Katz, with his wife and artis- tic partner, Dena, got an inspired notion for bringing live music back to the people again: “There were a lot of organizations that were doing streaming at the time, but I really felt that jazz is a live art form. So I wanted to still have live concerts but do them in a safe way.”
Jimmy Katz leads many lives. He is the preeminent currently active jazz photographer, and has shot more than 200 magazine covers and over 600 recording sessions. About 12 years ago he became an audio engineer, specializing in live recordings. His albums like Ralph Lalama’s Bopjuice: Live at Smalls are breakthroughs. They capture the blood-and-guts of live jazz with sonic resolution worthy of the best studios.
Autumn in New York is often a wondrous time — but last year was a whole different story. During a phase of the pandemic before vaccines or rapid tests, jazz clubs were still dark, like so many other businesses. There was a lot of hurt in the musical community.
So one valiant New Yorker aimed to bring a glimmer of hope by producing an outdoor concert series in the heart of Central Park: Jimmy Katz, legendary photographer and founder of Giant Step Arts, called the series Walk With the Wind.
This weekend's installment of Giant Step Arts' concert series features Melissa Aldana and Darius Jones
PUBLISHED OCTOBER 2, 2020 – BY JAZZTIMES
BYLONDONJAZZON 22 SEPTEMBER 2020
Joel Ross Quartet – Walk With The Wind series
(The Mall in Central Park NYC. 20 September 2020. Review by Dan Bergsagel)
While Manhattan was in the throes of the COVID-19 shutdown during 2020, renowned photographer, recording engineer, label head and lifelong jazz advocate Jimmy Katz, with his wife and artis- tic partner, Dena, got an inspired notion for bringing live music back to the people again: “There were a lot of organizations that were doing streaming at the time, but I really felt that jazz is a live art form. So I wanted to still have live concerts but do them in a safe way.”
Jimmy Katz leads many lives. He is the preeminent currently active jazz photographer, and has shot more than 200 magazine covers and over 600 recording sessions. About 12 years ago he became an audio engineer, specializing in live recordings. His albums like Ralph Lalama’s Bopjuice: Live at Smalls are breakthroughs. They capture the blood-and-guts of live jazz with sonic resolution worthy of the best studios.
Autumn in New York is often a wondrous time — but last year was a whole different story. During a phase of the pandemic before vaccines or rapid tests, jazz clubs were still dark, like so many other businesses. There was a lot of hurt in the musical community.
So one valiant New Yorker aimed to bring a glimmer of hope by producing an outdoor concert series in the heart of Central Park: Jimmy Katz, legendary photographer and founder of Giant Step Arts, called the series Walk With the Wind.
This weekend's installment of Giant Step Arts' concert series features Melissa Aldana and Darius Jones
PUBLISHED OCTOBER 2, 2020 – BY JAZZTIMES
BYLONDONJAZZON 22 SEPTEMBER 2020
Joel Ross Quartet – Walk With The Wind series
(The Mall in Central Park NYC. 20 September 2020. Review by Dan Bergsagel)
BYLONDONJAZZON 16 JULY 2020 • ( LEAVE A COMMENT )
Michael Thomas – Event Horizon
(Giant Step Arts. CD review by Sam Norris)
“The ‘event horizon’ is the perimeter around a black hole that marks the point of no return,” writes NYC-based alto saxophonist and composer Michael Thomas in the liner note for his latest album for Jimmy Katz’s Giant Step Arts. “Anything crossing that line will be unable to escape.” Named for the rather weighty concept he is describing, Thomas’s first effort as leader since 2011’s The Long Way assembles an aptly muscular musical cast. The saxophonist, a Julliard graduate and sideman with the likes of Brad Mehldau and Nicholas Payton, is joined by longtime collaborator Jason Palmer on trumpet, bassist Hans Glawischnig from the Miguel Zenon Quartet, and veteran NYC drummerJohnathan Blake; the resultant cocktail, documented across two nights at NYC’s Jazz Gallery, is fearlessly exploratory.
NEW RELEASE PICKS: Michael Thomas, Event Horizon (Giant Step Arts)Sometimes, the label releasing a record can serve as a doorway to more music of a similar stripe, or if not in the same style, than just stand as a signifier of quality. For obvious reasons, this scenario is now almost exclusive to independent labels as the big companies have long been predominantly profit driven. Well, Giant Step Arts, the label started by noted photographer Jimmy Katz, isn’t obsessed with profit. In Katz’s words, the label doesn’t even sell any music, but rather strives “to help musicians make bold artistic statements and to advance their careers.” In addition to premiering performances, recording them, and compensating the artists, once a project is complete, 700 compact discs (the complete run) and downloads are given to the leader of the session, who importantly retains ownership of the masters. Giant Step Arts also provides promo photos, videos and PR for the release.
By
Apr 22, 2020
The trumpeter Jason Palmer’s epic 2-disc programme The Concert brings to life legendary paintings that have disappeared from the museum that housed them for display; stolen by diabolical means, never to be seen again. In a sense they are about paintings that are “no longer there”. But what’s even more remarkable about the recording may be the utterly romantic and poetic conceit of this album and that may be explained in a somewhat analogous quote from Vincent van Gogh about Rembrandt: “Rembrandt goes so deep into the mysterious that he says things for which there are no words in any language. It is with justice that they call Rembrandt—magician—that’s no easy occupation.” Now why would this be both analogous and significant?
By Bill Beuttler Globe correspondent,Updated February 20, 2020, 3:01 p.m.
Jason Palmer isn’t particularly well known, but he’s a phenomenally busy guy. As an educator, the trumpeter juggles his jobs teaching jazz ensembles as an assistant professor at Berklee College of Music and giving private lessons at New England Conservatory.
Early in 2019, three jazz CDs appeared on a new record label. They were Jason Palmer's Rhyme and Reason, Johnathan Blake's Trion (both double CDs), and Eric Alexander's Leap of Faith. The label was Giant Step Arts.
Given that hundreds of jazz records—many of them good— are released every month, and that new jazz labels pop up all the time, is the release of three new albums really news?
Giant Step Arts is news. For starters, it is radically more than a record label. The story begins with Jimmy Katz.
Eric Alexander
Leap Of Faith
By Ed Enright
Eric Alexander steps outside of himself and embarks on far-reaching excursions for this live outing, recorded last August at New York’s Jazz Gallery with bassist Doug Weiss and drummer Jonathan Blake.
Leap Of Faith presents the tenor saxophonist in a liberated light, with few harmonic constraints to heed and no commercial expectations whatsoever from Jimmy Katz’s nonprofit organization Giant Step Arts [ed. note: Katz is a regular DownBeat contributor]. Alexander takes full advantage of this artistic and financial opportunity to explore his own wide-ranging tastes and shed his image as a bebop purist by boldly venturing into avant-garde territory and beyond. His playing is explosive, unbridled, searching and cathartic in this chordless trio setting—wide-open terrain that previously was unexplored by Alexander.
The program is all Alexander originals that were composed during a recent period of turbulence in the saxophonist’s life, and he clearly uses this new material to vent his wildest ideas and innermost emotions. Leap Of Faith begins with a brief free investigation that quickly takes shape as “Luquitas,” a showcase for the group’s boundless energy and unceasing momentum. The saxophonist plays with uttermost intensity on the swaggering “Hard Blues” and the Coltrane-fired “Second Impression.” Blake’s thundering drums anchor the blistering “Frenzy,” and Weiss’ resonant bowings serve as an essential undercurrent for “Magyar,” a work based on a reduction of themes from Béla Bartók’s Music For Strings, Percussion And Celesta.
With Leap Of Faith, Alexander followed the advice of his longtime friend Katz and pursued a project that radically departs from the norm, investigating a more expansive setting than the traditional bebop métier that has defined his artistry for decades. The resulting album is an honest depiction of one of today’s most burning tenor players, unleashed, at a pinnacle of raw passion.
Johnathan Blake, “Bedrum”
Johnathan Blake is one of the most accomplished drummers of his generation, and “Bedrum” shows that he is also a force of nature. This is one of the two solo-drum tracks from Blake’s new double-album Trion; an explosive and joyful percussive showcase that clocks in at almost three minutes. The rest of Trion is an invigorating exploration of the possibilities of the drum-sax-bass trio, with Blake playing alongside two other masters of their own instruments: saxophonist Chris Potter and Linda May Han Oh. Recorded live before a thrilled audience at New York City’s Jazz Gallery, Trion, out now, is the second release from Jimmy Katz’s Giant Step Arts, a non-profit with the single mission to help modern jazz innovators create their art free of commercial pressure.
Jason Palmer’s “Rhyme and Reason” is the first release from Giant Step Arts, a nonprofit dedicated to giving underappreciated but visionary jazz musicians the support they need to make quality live albums. Palmer is a perfect first subject for this: He’s a thrifty improviser with a vast dynamic range and an ambitious composer, but he’s hardly known. On “Herbs in a Glass,” the album’s opener, he propels his band mates (the tenor saxophonist Mark Turner, the bassist Matt Brewer and the drummer Kendrick Scott) through a squirrelly nine-beat rhythm; the odd, open-ended meter ends up pushing his intense melody into the plain air, giving it a billowy freedom. RUSSONELLO
Jason Palmer, “Waltz For Diana”
A sharp, charismatic trumpeter with a refreshingly playful streak, Jason Palmer has released a succession of strong yet often-underappreciated releases over the last decade. His new double album, Rhyme and Reason, seems likely to garner some serious attention, and not just because it features an ace quartet with Mark Turner on tenor saxophone, Matt Brewer on bass and Kendrick Scott on drums.
