THE NEW YORK CITY JAZZ RECORD: Label Spotlight - New Amsterdam
THE NEW YORK CITY JAZZ RECORD: Label Spotlight - New Amsterdam
BY KURT GOTTSCHALK
“For musicians creating work that falls between the usual boundaries, finding an audience isn’t the only worry. Getting their music recorded and distributed can also be a challenge when so many labels hold fast to long-established borders between predetermined and marketable categories. There are exceptions, of course, but few labels inhabit that buffer zone so avowedly as Brooklyn’s New Amsterdam Records.
‘Our mandate is really trying to represent records that would not have a home in other places because they don’t have a foot in traditional genres,’ says William Brittelle who—with fellow composers Judd Greenstein and Sarah Kirkland Snider—founded New Amsterdam Records in 2008. ‘Stylistic diversity is very important to us. Obviously we’re coming from a classical/new music place, but we’re trying to branch out more and more.’
Indeed, that first year saw eight releases— including Brittelle’s own Mohair Time Warp, a surprising merging of art song, commercial jingles and various pop and rock forms—that set a standard for fresh works by living composers with, perhaps, less than an established track record.
But the following year saw a broadening scope, even with less than half the titles. The release of Infernal Machines by Darcy James Argue’s 18-piece Secret Society gave the fledgling label its first stake in the jazz world, even if it was more by happenstance than strategy. The release was the result of being in the right place at the right time, when Brittelle and his co-artistic directors found themselves in the audience for one of Argue’s concerts. ‘We were aware of his blog and we all went to see a show of his at Le Poisson Rouge and we were all fawning over it,’ Brittelle said. ‘There were stretches that sounded like [Steve Reich’s] Music for 18 Musicians or TV on the Radio. We greatly admire what he and John [Hollenbeck] have been able to do, having an ensemble of that size for so many years.’
Keeping a big band active in this day and age is certainly no mean feat and having a supportive record label certainly helps make the endeavor remain viable. In 2018, New Amsterdam put out Hollenbeck’s All Can Work, the third release with his 20-piece Large Ensemble. The album included five of Hollenbeck’s original compositions along with some lesser-known Billy Strayhorn and Kenny Wheeler pieces and a memorable arrangement of a Kraftwerk tune. Hollenbeck came to the label with the album in mind, Brittelle said. ‘When he reached out to us, we were really excited,” he said. “He was a musician that we held up as a beacon of creative freedom.’
Hollenbeck was fairly well established by the time he came to New Amsterdam, but that’s certainly not true of all the artists and projects the label takes on. Infernal Machines, for example, was the first Secret Society release. The label has a stated interest in artist development, even while doing so without signing exclusive contracts with its artists. It’s a business strategy more likely to come from artists than from corporate interests.
‘We try to figure out how to build infrastructure or guide people through that first record or two and make it through to building an audience,’ Brittelle said. ‘That’s more difficult for a larger label to do. If they haven’t built an audience, that doesn’t make sense.’
But larger labels have their advantages as well and New Amsterdam isn’t opposed to the marketplace positioning made possible through corporate affiliation. After several years of negotiations, in 2019 the label announced a partnership with Nonesuch, a part of the Warner Music Group. The two companies have co-released albums by Brittelle, Pulitzer-winning composer Caroline Shaw and electro-acoustic composer Daniel Wohl.
Despite the considerable difference in size, though, Brittelle described the Nonesuch pairing as an equal partnership. ’In many ways, it feels like a peer-to-peer relationship,’ he said. ‘Nonesuch has such trust with its audience and that trust is based on the quality of work they’ve put out over the years. They’re a label that we’ve really admired and hold up as one example of content over stylistic cohesion. It felt like a huge jump for us to have Nonesuch’s stamp of approval over what we were doing.’
While christening the new partnership last year, New Amsterdam put out an additional 19 titles without the Nonesuch imprint. And in what might be seen as a swing toward the other direction, several of those were download-only releases in the label’s Windmill series, including a collection of solo improvisations by saxophonist Travis LaPlante recorded at intimate concerts in his home.
Last year also saw an unusual release by Mary Halvorson (which, in a fortuitous bit of timing, was set for release just weeks after the announcement of her MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’) paired with Deerhoof’s John Dieterich, each playing a variety of string instruments in addition to their usual guitars. The 2019 roster also included a set of songs by flutist Nathalie Joachim incorporating traditional Haitian music and recordings of her grandmother speaking and a girl’s choir from her childhood home in Dantan. The guiding force behind the diversity of releases, Brittelle said, is ‘being conscientious of what our infrastructure is built to serve. It’s not that we think that music that is genre-fluid is better than other kinds of music, it’s just that our infrastructure is built toward working with that,’ he explained. ‘There would certainly be all kinds of artists that we greatly admire that would not be a match for that.’
Whatever the form, or hybrid, an artist is working in, Brittelle stressed that the label’s goal is first and foremost to give musicians and composers room to grow. ‘It’s really important for artists to not know what they’re doing,’ he said. ‘They’re on their own journeys and they have to make mistakes or not make mistakes. There’s a great amount of value in exercising as little control as possible.’”