Smalls Records documents unique New York City scene
Luke Kaven hangs backstage during a jazz show at the Fat Cat. (RJ Mickelson)
By Lana Bortolot
Special to amNewYork
Smalls Records, an indie jazz label, started as a way to document the burgeoning bebop scene at an underground city nightspot.
In the mid-1990s, Luke Kaven began recording live shows at Smalls, the Greenwich Village jazz venue. In 2000, he founded the New York-based label, and in 2004 he released the first album.
“The fact that almost all [the artists] worked at Smalls and came up together makes them all historically and artistically interconnected,” Kaven said.
The first artist Kaven produced, pianist Frank Hewitt, died before his album was released in 2004, and many critics consider it a seminal piece of work.
“When Luke Kaven began to document the work, he put out some really important stuff that broke through the noise in terms of having an identity,” said jazz journalist Thomas Conrad, of Stereophile magazine and Jazz Times.
Kaven works with about 115 artists and has recorded more than 40 albums. He declined to discuss his total sales, but said the label puts out about 10 albums a year, printing between 15,000 and 20,000 CDs.
For the most part, he does the recording, mixing and marketing on his own.
“The challenge now for any small indie label is to be able to cut expenses and overhead to the absolute minimum,” Kaven said.
The Smalls label is experiencing the same downward trend as industrywide jazz sales, but Kaven has a niche audience and some generous benefactors.
Brandon Stranzl, an investment manager who co-founded the Smalls club, financed two recordings last fall.
“A lot of people can give money to the Red Cross or a hospital, but how many can support bebop artists that are at the very edge of where this music is going?” Stranzl said. “Luke has a brand that has remained true to artistic integrity in a world that doesn’t pay you for doing that.”
