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Big Jazz on SmallsLIVE
Harold Mabern
piano1936 - 2019
Jimmy Cobb
drums1929 - 2020
Larry Goldings
organ, Hammond B3b.1968
Roy Hargrove
trumpet1969 - 2018
Dezron Douglas
bass
Marcus Strickland
clarinet, bassFor
Spike Wilner
pianoAs far as the criteria that Wilner and his crew use on the SmallsLIVE label, "we've chosen artists that we think are indicative of the club or important to be heard." Each of the CDs on the label has a similar look and sound, to some degree. Almost all of them are entitled "Live at Smalls": David Schnitter Live at Smalls, Tyler Mitchell Live at Smalls, etc. The sound engineering and mixing is generally by the same team and the covers use eco-friendly packaging with black-and-white photos of the headlining artists. As of this writing, including a batch of four CDs released in the spring of 2013, SmallsLIVE has 40 albums in its catalog. "We usually do four at a time and usually three times a year if we can. It's a loose production schedule, but that's what we try to keep to. This latest batch includes one I'm especially excited about, the Harold Mabern Trio, with
Joe Farnsworth
drumsb.1968
John Webber
bass, acoustic"We also have a quartet led by
Joe Magnarelli
trumpetb.1960
Mulgrew Miller
piano1955 - 2013
Alex Sipiagin
trumpetb.1967
Seamus Blake
saxophoneb.1970
David Kikoski
pianob.1961
Boris Koslov
bass
Nate Smith
drumsb.1974
Will Vinson
saxophone, altob.1977
Ari Hoenig
drumsb.1973
Lage Lund
guitar
Aaron Parks
drumsb.1983
Matt Brewer
bassb.1983
Marcus Gilmore
drumsb.1986
The previous grouping of releases on SmallsLIVE, issued January 2013, was another set of four, featuring ensembles led by two veterans and two younger musicians—two bassists and two tenor saxophonists.
Bassist
Dezron Douglas
bass
Stacy Dillard
saxophone
Josh Evans
trumpet
David Bryant
piano
Willie Jones III
drumsb.1968
Veteran bassist
Tyler Mitchell
bassb.1958
Art Taylor
drums1929 - 1995
Barry Harris
piano1929 - 2021
Sun Ra
piano1914 - 1993
Abraham Burton
saxophone, altob.1971
The two tenor saxophonists in this grouping of four CDs are 
Grant Stewart
saxophone, tenorb.1971
David Schnitter
saxophoneb.1948
Tardo Hammer
pianob.1958
Phil Stewart
drums
David Wong
bass
Peter Bernstein
guitarb.1967
Neal Miner
bass, acousticb.1970
Wilner plays piano on the David Schnitter CD, along with 
Ugonna Okegwo
bass
Anthony Pinciotti
drums
Art Blakey
drums1919 - 1990
The recordings on SmallsLIVE include a number of intriguing lineups. A 2010 CD by the guitarist Peter Bernstein, one of the first releases on the label, which Wilner considers "a classic," included the Miles Davis alum Jimmy Cobb on drums. "Pete is a guy who's just so beautiful and talented in what he does. He's just a consummate artist. He comes out of that strong tradition of swing and blues and romantic playing, and he also marries it to a modern sound and modern ideas. He was a huge influence on me and a lot of the musicians that I know." In addition to the quartet CD with Cobb, Bernstein appears on a SmallsLIVE 2011 release, Bernstein/Goldings/Stewart Live at Smalls, where he teams up with long-standing collaborators, organist
Larry Goldings
organ, Hammond B3b.1968
Bill Stewart
drumsb.1966
Wilner himself is featured as the pianist on little more than a handful of the CDs in the SmallsLIVE catalog, but he's the common thread throughout, since the label focuses mainly on the musicians that appear at Smalls Jazz Club on a regular basis, along with notable special guests. Wilner is a major presence at the club, and he throws himself into it completely. "One of the things with me and Smalls is that I have a personal relationship with everyone who plays here. There's no musician that comes into this club that I don't either know as a colleague or as a friend. A lot of them are guys that I've known for my entire adult life and my whole career as an artist myself... Pete Bernstein may be my closest friend right now, actually. We've been friends since teenage years... Larry Goldings was my college roommate freshman year at the New School. He's the guy that started calling me 'Spike,' by the way. He started calling me that as kind of a joke, and I got really angry when people called me that, and I think because of that, it ended up sticking hard. But Larry is a guy I've known for years and he's been a big influence on me musically. I learned so much piano from him back in the day."
Another early release on SmallsLIVE features tenor saxophonist Seamus Blake, a more recent acquaintance of Wilner's, who is joined by pianist David Kikoski, guitarist Lage Lund, bassist 
Matt Clohesy
bassBassist
Ben Wolfe
bassb.1962
Ryan Kisor
trumpetb.1973
Luis Perdomo
pianob.1971
Gregory Hutchinson
drumsb.1970
E.J. Strickland
drums
The biggest selling CD in the catalog is 
Cyrille Aimée
vocalsb.1984
Spencer Murphy
bass, electricb.1988
Ken Fowser
saxophone, tenorb.1982
"Cyrille is an incredibly beautiful and talented musician, and she also happens to be one of the best, if not the best, scat- singing vocalist I've ever heard in my life. She is really like a horn player. She can sing beautifully and render beautiful songs, but she's also an amazing improviser harmonically and rhythmically. She is in the changes, she's phrasing, she's creating with the band in ways that are just amazing. We became very close personally as well as musically, and we had a lot of wonderful gigs together, traveled to Europe together. She was somebody I knew was going to get famous quick, and I wanted to record her really quickly before anybody else did.
"When we talked about the record date, she said she wanted to try to get
Roy Hargrove
trumpet1969 - 2018
Joel Frahm
saxophone, tenor
Phil Kuehn
bassWilner has a number of other personal favorites on SmallsLIVE. One is by trombonist
Steve Davis
tromboneb.1967
Larry Willis
piano1942 - 2019
Kevin Hays
pianob.1968
Bruce Barth
pianob.1958
Kurt Rosenwinkel
guitarb.1970
Joe Martin
bassb.1970
Otis Brown III
drumsAs with just about all commercially released recordings today, the music on SmallsLIVE is available via downloads as well as in CD format through the club's website, as well as through the SmallsLIVE iTunes store.
While SmallsLIVE presents a good representative sampling of the scene at Smalls Jazz Club, there's actually a huge collection of other live recordings done at the club beyond what's on the label. Wilner has set up an "audio archive" on the club's website that has some 7,000 recordings in it, with more than 600 musicians represented. These recordings don't get the same attention that the ones on the SmallsLIVE label do—the mixing, mastering and post production—but the sound quality is quite good, and, for now at least, everything is can be streamed for free on the club's website.Wilner installed a recording system—audio and video—not long after he began his full-time association with the club in 2007. Even from the outset, he wasn't just thinking about making a few recordings here and there. "We started recording everything, and then, eventually, it led to the system we have currently, our audio archive and the video archive... It's all categorized by date and the musicians on each date. You can find out information about every artist that's ever played here too, get their bios and photos, in addition to hearing the audio. We have the full length recording, just the gig as is, the point being to create a time capsule of sorts so that in the future, when Smalls is no longer, we'll have this chunk of work that people can point to and say, well, this is what happened here.
"My inspiration for it was how they would put radio wires in the old clubs back in the day, like in Kansas City. John Hammond [the Columbia Records producer] was driving from Chicago and he heard the
Count Basie
piano1904 - 1984
Wilner is poised to take the Smalls audio archive in a new direction, "a new kind of SmallsLIVE," which he hopes to debut by the fall of 2013. "What we're finding now is that running a record company is almost impossible. There's no market for physical CDs. There are hardly any stores anywhere to buy CDs. And hardly anyone buys them anymore. It's a dead end. The digital download market is also limited. You can do some things. We have an exclusive account with iTunes for SmallsLIVE and we sell downloads from our own site. But for the most part it's a really difficult business to sell recorded projects. The old-school idea where the record company signs the artists, pays them some money and puts together this one-off product that's marketed and sold—I think it's a dinosaur. It's not economically worthwhile anymore, and there's no market for it.
"What is viable and marketable these days is the idea of libraries of content—subscriptions, like Netflicks. There, you pay a monthly fee for unlimited usage of this library of films that you can watch as much as you like. So, what I'm currently working on is a mechanism of revenue sharing for artists where our new model for SmallsLIVE will be to convert our audio archive into a more streamlined library and charge a monthly subscription fee for unlimited access. The archive will grow with new content, week after week. And every artist in there will be registered. We'll be monitoring how many minutes of listening time each artist gets, and then they'll get a piece of this revenue pie that we collect every month. What I'm trying to do, you might say, is to create one of the biggest record companies ever, with every artist who plays at Smalls signed to the label."
The approach is a reversal of what Smalls now does between its video and audio archive. "Right now, there's a subscription fee for our video, and the audio archive is free. But we feel that that's not the right paradigm. We only make our live video free on Wednesday nights. We take down the pay wall and advertise it on Facebook. We'll see as many as 10,000 to 15,000 views in the course of a night, worldwide. So, my philosophy is if I can make this free every night, where we can start generating a nightly audience worldwide, 10,000 or 15,000 viewers or more, we can say, hey, if you enjoyed the show tonight and you want to watch it again or listen again, become a subscriber to our archive. Then we're benefiting everyone, the musicians will get paid, and I think it'll work all around. So that's the new vision, and I think if I can implement that, then, the CD label itself might go the way of the dodo."I might still have special projects with CDs here and there, but the truth is it's just not economically viable. It's very hard to recover the money you put into it, between paying the artist, the printing costs for the CDs, and the artwork and mixing and post production. I'm sure that if you talk to anyone at any record label, they'll tell you the same thing. A lot of labels these days are vanity projects where you have wealthy people who just don't care about actual profit. Although, in my case, I don't really care about profit, either, really. What I care about is the dissemination of the music worldwide. That's my main goal. And I think taking SmallsLIVE in this new direction will be a better way to do that. I'm excited to see what happens with it. I think it could be a new paradigm for the music industry in general."
Beyond his work recording shows at Smalls and breaking new ground with ways to distribute the music, Wilner has his hands full with maintaining the club, managing it and keeping the staff organized, not to mention practicing piano and performing. "There's the lawyers, accountants—it's insane having to stay on top of the taxes—plus the banking and payroll. Everything's on the books; we do Federal withholding for everybody. Then there's the bar management, ordering booze and beer, keeping a wine list. Smalls is very labor intensive. You could just open a bar, and you wouldn't have to work as hard as we do here. But the thing about Smalls is that it's not so much a jazz club as some kind of religious organization. It's really like a monastery. It's a place for art, and there's a very dense community, with many interpersonal relationships that I'm in the center of. It involves a lot of social work. I'll loan money to people, work with them on getting medical help, write letters of recommendation for people to help them stay in the City. Artists come here to paint, writers come to write. We're very concerned with the culture of art in New York, and I want to make sure that our little thing here is still viable in the City because it's so rare now. It's almost gone. That's our mission."As a lifelong New Yorker, Wilner has seen a lot of changes in the City and in the local jazz landscape. He's been in the thick of the jazz scene since the 1980s, when he joined the very first class of students in the jazz performance program at the New School. "That was a seminal event in my life," he recalls. "I was kind of floating around at that time, waffling between music and computers. I decided that I was really a musician, and I heard about this new program that was being started at the New School by
Arnie Lawrence
saxophoneb.1938
Tommy Flanagan
piano1930 - 2001
"The initial class of that school was chock full of the stars of our current scene: 
Brad Mehldau
pianob.1970
Jesse Davis
saxophone, altob.1965
Sam Yahel
organ, Hammond B3
Joe Strasser
drums"At that time it was an amazing thing; it was so small, it was run more like a forum than a school. Everyone would gather together in a room. Some great jazz master would come in, and we'd just hang out with him. That was the school. Jimmy Cobb would show up, and we'd all play with Jimmy Cobb. Or
Donald Byrd
trumpet1932 - 2013
Milt Jackson
vibraphone1923 - 1999
Ram Ramirez
keyboards1913 - 1994
Cecil Payne
saxophone, baritone1922 - 2007
"And we also caught the very tail end of the great New York jazz scene. When I was a freshman, sophomore and junior at school, there were still 35 or 40 jazz clubs in town. You could still go all over the place at night, Bradley's, the Village Gate and so many other places and still hear the
Tommy Flanagan
piano1930 - 2001
Wilner has fond memories of the Village Gate especially. "That's where there were jam sessions all the time. Art D'Lugoff owned it, and " data-original-title="" title="">Raphael D'Lugoff, his son, who's a great pianist, became a great friend of mine. The Gate was just like a madhouse, musicians in and out, jam sessions. That was the hang. They finally went out of business in '93, when they lost their lease."
Not long after the Village Gate closed, Mitch Borden opened the original Smalls, in April 1994, at the same location of the current club, 183 West 10th Street in Greenwich Village. "I remember I was hanging with Grant Stewart, and he got a phone call. He said, 'Hey there's this new club opening, I just got a gig there. Smalls.' We all came down to Smalls, and Mitch had this free-for-all approach to the music. It was just this rumpus room for musicians, and it became kind of a wild pit. It's hard to describe. There was no bar; there was no anything. People would pay ten dollars to get in and bring their own beer. There was no liquor license. It was open 24/7. You were just there all the time. I became part of the fabric back then. I played my own gigs there, and I led a jam session, a late night session, from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m."Eventually Mitch was undone by rising costs and the fire department and City code—just getting penalized to death. The City changed so much, especially after 9/11. It was interesting to watch. It went from a much freer kind of vibe to something that was much more controlled. It's still very strict now. Mitch finally went bankrupt, and the club was closed in 2003 for almost two years. Then it reopened in a weird incarnation as a Brazilian venue before I became a partner back in 2007."
While Smalls doesn't have the wild and loose feel it had in the '90s, it's open seven days a week until 4 a.m., with three or four bands playing every night, and the club still hosts late-night jam sessions on Mondays and Tuesdays. Wilner finds booking bands at the club to be a challenge. "It's hard because I have a lot of friends. I love these musicians so much, dearly, but I can't just give the people who are my friends the gigs, because it doesn't quite work like that. If there's a senior artist who deserves a gig and needs it, we provide for them. If there are guys who are just clearly at the forefront of the scene and there's no question that they should be performing, then that's obvious. And then there are young guys who are up-and-coming, and we really want to promote the ideas coming through the ranks. And we have to think about who are the artists who really bring something to the club.
"I always tell people the scene dictates the booking policy for me. We just try to keenly observe it and be as fair as possible. I try to be very compassionate and attentive—but at the same time, I can't give everybody everything that they want. We've now gone to an invitation-only booking policy, actually."The club is so small. Our budget is tiny. The artists who play here get paid less than what they should be making and less than what they might make somewhere else, but they're glad to play here because of our environment and who we are. They know that we have the best interest in mind in terms of the music. The integrity level here is very high. And the playing field is very high. If you're playing a gig at Smalls, maybe Dave Kikoski is going to be in the audience, or Greg Hutchinson or Harold Mabern. You're not going to be playing for a bunch of tourists who don't know anything about jazz. This is a very sophisticated audience, and it's not just the musicians who come here—we attract people who are serious jazz fans who really know music. The bar is set high for anyone who plays here, even at jam sessions, and that's something that we want to maintain."
Selected Discography
Harold Mabern Trio, Live at Smalls (SmallsLIVE, 2013)
Joe Magnarelli, Live at Smalls (SmallsLIVE, 2013)
Alex Sipiagin, Live at Smalls (SmallsLIVE, 2013)
Will Vincent, Live at Smalls (SmallsLIVE, 2013)
David Schnitter, Live at Smalls (SmallsLIVE, 2013)
Tyler Mitchell, Live at Smalls (SmallsLIVE, 2013)
Grant Stewart, Live at Smalls (SmallsLIVE, 2013)
Dezron Douglas, Live at Smalls (SmallsLIVE, 2013)
Joel Frahm Quartet, Live at Smalls (SmallsLIVE, 2011)
Bernstein/Goldings/Stewart, Live at Smalls (SmallsLIVE, 2011)
Bruce Barth Trio, Live at Smalls (SmallsLIVE, 2011)
Cyrille Aimee + Friends, Live at Smalls (SmallsLIVE, 2011)
Spike Wilner, Solo Piano Live at Smalls (SmallsLIVE, 2011)
Ben Wolfe Quintet, Live at Smalls (SmallsLIVE, 2011)
Planet Jazz , Live at Smalls (SmallsLIVE, 2010)
Ethan Iverson/Albert "Tootie" Heath/ Ben Street, Live at Smalls (SmallsLIVE, 2010)
Seamus Blake Quintet, Live at Smalls (SmallsLIVE, 2010)
Steve Davis Quintet, Live at Smalls (SmallsLIVE, 2010)
Peter Bernstein Quartet, Live at Smalls (SmallsLIVE, 2010)
Kevin Hays Trio, Live at Smalls (SmallsLIVE, 2010)
Photo Credit
Pages 1, 4: Herb Scher
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Record Label Profiles
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United States
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Harold Mabern
Jimmy Cobb
Larry Goldings
Roy Hargrove
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Marcus Strickland
Joe Farnsworth
John Webber
Joe Magnarelli
Mulgrew Miller
Alex Sipiagin
Seamus Blake
David Kikoski
Boris Koslov
Nate Smith
Will Vinson
ari hoenig
Lage Lund
Aaron Parks
Matt Brewer
Marcus Gilmore
Stacy Dillard
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Willie Jones III
Tyler Mitchell
Art Taylor
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Sun Ra
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Tardo Hammer
Phil Stewart
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Peter Bernstein
Neal Miner
Ugonna Okegwo
Anthony Pinciotti
Art Blakey
Bill Stewart
Matt Clohesy
Ben Wolfe
Ryan Kisor
Luis Perdomo
Greg Hutchinson
E.J.
Cyrille Aimee
Spencer Murphy
Ken Fowser
Joel Frahm
Phil Kuehn
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Steve Davis
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Joe Martin
Otis Brown
Count Basie
Arnie Lawrence
Tommy Flanagan
brad mehldau
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Sam Yahel
Joe Strasser
Donald Byrd
Milt Jackson
Ram Ramirez
Cecil Payne
Tommy Flanagan Trio
Raphie D'Lugoff
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