A
FIRESIDE CHAT WITH MICHAEL DORF
As the founder and owner of the Knitting Factory, Michael Dorf has been
at the heart of the success of New York's downtown scene. He is branching
out to make that same kind of impact via internet with Jazze.com.
But when he made plans to break ground for a Knitting Factory location
here in Los Angeles, I had to find out if Dorf had lost his business sense.
Afterall, my city isn't exactly known for its progressive improvisational
music. He seems quite serious about it and has put an even more serious
amount of money behind it. This is a candid conversation with a man that
has quite a vision, unedited and in his own words.
FRED JUNG: Let's start from the beginning.
MICHAEL DORF: Well, I think I didn't have a choice about putting the Knitting
Factory in Manhattan. It sort of sprung up. The idea originally really
was to create a community space. And sometimes people actually have confused
the Knitting Factory with being a non-profit organization, especially
for the first many years when we were kind of the avant-garde haven, purely
non-commercial, underground kind of establishment because of the music
we supported and our outreach to the community and really being a facility
for the local artists, musicians, painters, filmmakers, writers, poets,
to all have a stage and have an opportunity to communicate and express
themselves. We very quickly within our history became a record company
after a couple of years because we just tried to extend the stage and
use the vehicle of CDs to reach a larger audience and so it's been a very
symbiotic relationship with the artistic community because I'm a hungry,
aggressive person trying to support the music that I like in a very smart
marketing, business way and help expand the audience. So it's been a great
back and forth as the community of musicians and artists expanded and
got better known and grew, so did we. It's been very symbiotic. But Manhattan
to start the club thirteen years ago, the timing was really right. The
musicians especially were really desperate for an outlet that they could
openly work and so we became known especially for our music because all
of the strength of the music scene that grew around it.
FJ: Have you seen the scene change over the thirteen years?
MICHAEL DORF: From a music fan's side, I've seen the music constantly
evolving and going through ebbs and flows of activity. I've only seen
a momentum, kind of a bull market if you used a metaphor, of activity.
I've only seen more and more activity happening from the content side,
from the creation. From the consumer side, I would say the more traditional
jazz side, even the kind of improv jazz world audience, it's certainly
difficult to support and maintain and it's require a tremendous amount
of cross-marketing and cross-fertilization of different musical communities.
Accept what each other are doing and seeing the value. Getting turned
onto new music, whether it's the independent rock world of the Sonic Youths
and Henry Rollins. Falling in love with the free jazz stuff of Charles
Gayle or David S. Ware or the kind of Grateful Dead jazz stuff of Phish
and Medeski, Martin, and Wood. Those cats are honing in on a lot of the
jazz things like Sun Ra. The cross-fertilization has become very important
to keeping the scene active and to making the customer and fan base expanding.
I'm not certain that's a purely natural progression or whether it's been
somewhat fostered by our eclectic programming.
FJ: I have seen the audience at the Knitting Factory become considerably
younger through the years, how much of an importance did you place on
establishing a younger audience? And how rewarding has it been for you
to see such a young audience clamor for the music?
MICHAEL DORF: To answer the latter first, it's extremely rewarding to
see a room at a festival of a thousand kids and younger people grooving
to Sun Ra. Sun Ra never played in front of a thousand people. To have
Medeski, Martin, and Wood or somebody doing Sun Ra covers, Violent Femmes
doing some Sun Ra covers to a whole younger audience, that's pretty amazing.
That's pretty exciting and rewarding. It feels like our place, in terms
of expanding jazz, we're fulfilling our mission in that sense. You're
other question, in terms of the audience in general getting younger, I
think a lot has to do with the show and the programming. When we book
Cecil Taylor, it's still predominantly an over-forty or fifty-year-old
crowd. Medeski, Martin, and Wood, clearly is a younger crowd. There's
no question that a younger crowd is more active in terms of going out
to see live music on a regular basis. It's one of the main reasons we're
putting a lot of energy into our new media and technology to deliver jazz
and the Knitting Factory experience into people's homes, so that we can
reach some of the audiences that isn't going to Tower to buy the CD or
isn't going into the clubs to check out music, but they haven't stopped
loving music. They just don't access it the way they used to. Technology
is clearly the way we're going to be able to access these people, and
there's a lot of unfulfilled forty and fifty-year-olds, who grew up with
music, that it's a big part of their lives, but they feel so disconnected
that they still just listen to the Allman Brothers and Miles Davis. They
know that there is other stuff happening out there. They just don't know
how to connect to it. So that is part of our mission now, is using new
media and technology to continue to do what our mission is, which is expand
the audience and cross-fertilize, but let's do what we can to get this
into people's homes.
FJ: We'll come back to the new media projects in a second. How do you
respond to traditionalists out there, both artists and critics, who feel
that the type of improvised music that is showcased at the Knitting Factory
is not jazz?
MICHAEL DORF: I mean, there's the Wynton camp, who really think that the
most important thing to do for jazz is to preserve and go back and only
pay respect to the past, rather than try and look at what's going to expand
it. Unfortunately, we lost Lester Bowie recently, who was an amazing,
sort of, dichotomist and the opposite of Wynton in that regard. What's
to say? I wouldn't discount what Wynton does as jazz at all. I think he's
an amazing player and very creative within the world that he works. That's
a big part of jazz. It's where it came from, but there's all kinds of
congenial elements to the music that people call jazz. If you just went
by definition of what Tower Records does, in terms of depositing the music
into different camps, I guess, I take the Tower Records approach to jazz.
If it ain't rock and it isn't soundtrack and it isn't classical, but it's
instrumental and you're not sure where it goes, then you put it into jazz.
In a sense, I kind of do the same. Obviously, Fred, I'm being somewhat
cynical about it, but for the most part, and you know that we called our
festivals for many years, "What is jazz?" We were trying to help define
and not define what jazz is. Especially today, going into the millennium,
we're seeing the influences from all over the world, past and present,
and to discount what John Zorn is doing or Don Byron is doing or Henry
Threadgill is doing as not being jazz is ludicrous. That's an improvisation.
That's in some cases using African rhythms or any kind of pattern to the
music, whether it's math in Braxton's case or purely kind of swing thing
that Wynton is doing, that's all jazz. It's ludicrous to say it's not.
FJ: What has been John Zorn's impact on the downtown scene and the musical
community as a whole?
MICHAEL DORF: John is one of the most gifted humans on the planet right
now. He is the easiest human to work with, or live with, or be friends
with, or spend time with. He's clearly one of the most gifted. His contribution
to the music, I think the Times (New York) said that he's one of the most
important composers of the century. He is absolutely in the blue chip
status of composers. He's got a following of people on the Lower East
Side. He had tremendous band projects. He's prolific and extremely fun
to listen to. He ticks off all of my particular boxes, when it comes to
the kind of styles of music that I like. I really, as a fan, am very,
very much a fan of John. He's had a huge impact. I think his record labels
(Tzadik) are very helpful. They are giving a lot of musicians with the
opportunity to put more releases out. I think the focus on the Jewish
music has been a phase for seven years and very much similar to what we
have done, in terms of what we have done, in terms of our Jewish record
label. One of our four labels is JAM, Jewish Alternative Movement. We're
very similar in that sense.
FJ: You mentioned how vital the programming was to the success of the
Knitting Factory, how much of an active role do you still play in scheduling
the calendar for the Knitting Factory's various spaces?
MICHAEL DORF: I booked the club up until three years ago. I still have,
pretty much, executive A&R on the label. I think I helped set up the aesthetic
goalposts of what people need to kick the ball through now. Right now
and for the last three years, I have had an amazing programmer, his name
is Glenn Max (The Club Programming Director), who really is a perfect
extension of what I'd like the club to be booked, plus he's got his own
flavor, which I want to acknowledge and allow for. I think it fits exactly
our mission.
FJ: What is the Knitting Factory's mission statement?
MICHAEL DORF: I used to say in interviews all the time, we always want
to book what doesn't get booked elsewhere. On some level, having multiple
stages allows us to experiment with stuff, so that we can have something
in a small room and we're not programming based on ticket sales, but based
on music. The multiple room approach has been part of the way we've helped
create our programming as well. By having the ability to balance out where
we put people and be somewhat intelligent about the draw and demand of
from the audience on what goes where and have these multiple offerings.
Now, in New York, we have four stages on Leonard Street. It gives us a
lot of flexibility to put things in the right place and allows certain
things to develop. In the main space is our bread and butter. We need
to do well in there in order to play the rent. But the other rooms are
really able to support the music based the aesthetics and not necessarily
based on the commerce. In Los Angeles, we're setting up exactly that way.
There's two performance spaces. It's completely soundproof, fully isolated,
fully autonomous, all coming out of our main bar, restaurant and it allows
us to fill up the main room with a rock show or something more pop. That
going to pay the rent that night and then in the 75 seat room, we're able
to book and introduce the locals to Dave Douglas or Joey Baron or Zorn.
He's probably going to get into the main room. Where they might not have
a place to play, or Nels Cline's Monday night series that he used to do.
These are the things that we're lucky enough by having a facility like
this to be able to support.
FJ: The Los Angeles Knitting Factory, I have been a life-long Angeleno
and the one detraction about the city is its lack of support for jazz
music. Knowing that, what would possess you to build a Knitting Factory
here?
MICHAEL DORF: In New York, when we came to New York, Fred, in 1986, the
scene was a couple of commercial places, the Blue Note and the Village
Vanguard. Then in the rock world, you had a lot of the alternative clubs.
On some levels, there's almost an analogous story here. While there is
clearly less of a traditional jazz, tourist business here, and that is
what Blue Note, Sweet Basils, and Vanguard support themselves on. It's
not a local jazz scene. It's a tourist jazz scene that is coming to New
York for jazz. That's different. In terms of what is supporting local
musicians, it's very similar in a sense to what it was in New York, very
fragmented city. Part of that is physical logistics. There are realities
for someone who is living way off in the Valley or someone who is living
down here in Marina Del Rey. They're probably not hanging out at the same
places on a nightly basis. In Manhattan, it's a different story. We had
to be realistic about that as well, but the scene, there are a lot of
great players from a lot of different disciplines who are looking for
a bit of community. It is also our way to create an exciting destination
that I think we have certainly learned. And Fred, you have to be a bit
audacious. But at the same time, we're not going to book the same way
we booked in New York. First of all, we're only going to be needing to
book six days a week because one day a week, we're going to be doing parties,
private parties. That's Los Angeles. Los Angeles is a party town. Between
all the studios and entertainment companies, I think we'll have fifty-two
parties a year and we're building that into the reality of what we need
to do in terms of creating our facility. We're just being very realistic
about what is Los Angeles, what's going to work here. We're certainly
going to introduce a lot of players from the East Coast and from Europe
and Asia, that maybe have avoided Los Angeles. We're also going to be
realistic about needing to book the more commercial pop/rock things that
help pay the rent and again, work towards that cross-fertilization the
way have done in New York, understanding that this is Los Angeles.
FJ: Where is the Los Angeles location and when do you expect it to open?
MICHAEL DORF: We're looking at a late April opening. We've groundbroken
and we're in there with construction. I was hoping to be open by March,
but the construction is delayed, or it's not even delayed, it is what
it takes to build this facility. It's going to be a phenomenal facility.
It's in the Galaxy Building, next to the Chinese Mann Theatre on Hollywood
Boulevard.
FJ: Parking could be a nightmare.
MICHAEL DORF: There's 692 parking spaces right below us. Escalators open
up right into our space. Tower Records has taken over 25,000 square feet
just next to us, within the Galaxy. Between the two of us, we're pretty
much the entire ground floor. They're going to be doing a full outside
renovation over the next year and a half to change the ugliness and the
horribly unsubtle neon kind of thing that the Hollywood Galaxy is. That's
going to be just around the time that the Academy Theatre (the new home
for the Academy Awards) and that whole complex around the Chinese Mann
Theatre opens up. This will be the real entertainment center for all of
Los Angeles. For us, again, Fred, it's part of the balanced reality we
have to accept. In order for us to fill the club up six nights a week,
we have to be in the right location. Hollywood is in the middle of it
all and if the city is doing everything it can to make this a conducive
place to go out and to see live entertainment and filmed entertainment
and make it kind of have a buzz, we need to be there. We're just going
to be there with a little more cutting edge attitude. As we say, the "downtown"
of Hollywood. Immediately across could be uptown, but we're downtown.
I don't care what the people say, we're downtown in philosophy. We have
a great location. We're putting a fair amount of money into this facility
and a lot of that has to do with our new media work. We're really looking
at showcasing what we do to capture the shows. Archive them when we get
permission from the artist and use it as a broadcast center. When you
walk in, just like New York, you don't pay to get inside. You pay to go
into a show. We, just like New York, have found that by doing that, you
can go and have a drink with a friend at the Knitting Factory. You never
have to pay to go see a show and you don't go see a show. You just sit
out in the bar and have a great drink. If you want to go see a performance,
just like you do when you go see a movie, you don't go inside the movie
to talk, you're there to watch the performance. We're got our box office
in the middle of the space and then from there you can buy your ticket
and go into one of the performance rooms. It elevates the seriousness
of the music. You certainly can have a drink inside, but once your inside
the performance theatre, you're really there to watch the show and the
drinking is incidental to the performance. It's not like a typical club,
where you pay once to get in and it's all one room, you've got a bar.
That's not how we approach it. The main performance space will hold about
five hundred people. It's got a great balcony that is set up much like
a theatre, rapped around. It's a cascading balcony with three levels.
It's prime viewing. The sound company has come in and worked with us with
the design of the room to make it acoustically perfect. They are fully
sound isolated from each other so that we can use them as sound stages.
The sound system is state of the art. Cameras are positioned everywhere,
done with optical fiber. You will be able to turn on a switch and go live
to any cable television satellite, whether it's for a news conference
or just to do a webcast. It will literally be a flip of a switch. The
centerpiece of the entire facility when you walk in is a glass enclosed
control room. You come in. You have your drink. You buy your ticket or
you look at the CD selections or you talk to somebody and in the middle
of the room there is this glass enclosed control room where you see what
the engineers are doing. We're exposing the gut of this facility and the
technology that surrounds using this as a broadcast center. What we're
building here expands tremendously on what we've done in New York, in
terms of having the studio be in the basement and you don't really see
that we're webcasting or recording the concert. Here, that's what we're
showcasing. And then one more thing, Fred, before I tell you, I believe
this is the first smart club. It is the first truly connected space. It
blows House of Blues away in this regard. We're trying to demonstrate
how to bring and make the technology get woven in to the brick and mortar
facility. At the tables, on the walls, and within the space will be an
opportunity to videoconference with people back in New York. You can share
this connected experience of being in the Knitting Factory. Have a drink
with somebody. Flirt with somebody. As the technology increases, you can
have videoconference over internet protocol, which you can't get, we'll
be able to have people outside be talking to somebody inside. That line
between being at the Knitting Factory and at the Knitting Factory online
will start to blur. That's where we're really trying to go and demonstrate
with this club. It's an incredibly huge time, as we're hitting the millennium,
where the cost of technology is allowing a little small like me to truly
create this interactive facility. I feel very lucky and blessed. Here
we are, actually putting this place in and actually being technologically
focused. That's always been our mission is to expand the audience. Here's
a way to expand the audience and create a space that is truly unprecedented.
FJ: New media, let's touch on your efforts with the new media end of the
Knitting Factory.
MICHAEL DORF: Jim (Eigo) is in charge of catalog development. Right now,
what that means is it's not purely making deals to put out records. It's
really talking to the artists, both for their past work and for their
present work and creating a very fair digital distribution equation. We're
doing something extremely fair, unprecedented in a partnership with musicians,
where we do a fifty-fifty split of the royalty of all the revenue that
comes in off a digital download. That's never happened before in music
at all. If we sell that download for five dollars of a one-hour Rashied
Ali concert that took place in 1955. Out of that five dollar sale, the
artist gets two-fifty and we get two-fifty. That's never been the case
and technology is allowing it to happen that way. There's really three
winners in this new world. The consumer is paying less and there is more
available. The artist is getting a higher percentage and we actually don't
have to pay for all this positioning in the shelf-spaced world, where
there is very limited space for stuff that is pretty niche. Everyone really
wins in this world. That's what Jim is doing out there rapidly, accumulating
and developing our catalog in this area. We really have twelve people
in the technology group. They are building sites, making deals, coding.
We have a lot of temp people now, entering data into Jazze.com, a huge
push of ours. I can't believe how the team has grown last year.
FJ:
For the benefit of those who are not net prolific, what is Jazze.com?
MICHAEL
DORF: Basically, Fred, we saw a huge gap in what was being done out there
in the music space online and what opportunity. We had to use some of
our assets and some of our knowledge in developing what we think can be
and is, in this short amount of time, the number one jazz destination
online. N2K tried and started with Jazz Central Station (N2K has since
sold the site) and hats off to Larry Rosen (the "R" in GRP Records) for
trying. I think it was a little early and they lost a ton of money and
we gained an understanding and experience of their experiment. One thing
that Larry proved and Tower Records proved and a lot of facts proved,
is that while jazz might only represent three percent of the retail market
in terms of CDs, online it's closer to ten percent of the retail market.
Whether it's CDNow or Amazon or Tower or at the time, Larry's Music Boulevard,
there's a big gap between the jazz buyer online and the jazz buyer in
the real world. It makes a lot of sense. It's just an older demographic
that perhaps is not buying in the traditional way. The standard buying
of CDs is becoming more difficult because of the other gap, which is,
"How do you know what to buy?" Amazon is doing a pretty good job of creating
these lists, but people are looking for a lot more information about jazz,
a lot more of what's happening today, what happened before. What we've
tried to look at is, "How can we assemble a site that can help give the
three Es, the education of jazz, making jazz an entertaining place, how
do fulfill the e-commerce?" So if you are interested in Louis Armstrong,
here's every record that Louis did. Here's some old video clips that we
have digitized, streaming into your computer. Here's a couple of radio
shows. Here's Louis' phrase about what is jazz. Here's everything that
you want about Louis and as you're engaging with Louis, you have the opportunity
to click and buy a download. It's not the typical shopping experience.
It's closer to being at Starbucks.
FJ:
The horror, Michael, another Starbucks.
MICHAEL
DORF: (Laughing) Well, here, you're going to a place where you want to
learn about the particular subject matter and there just happens to be
product that is offered. It's not the experience you get when you go to
Amazon or Tower or any other online site. It's got a real mixture. We
believe that that is the experience that people want to have. You can
learn a lot about jazz by going to Amazon.com. You get these huge discographies
and records that I've never heard of. I sometimes just like to look at
all of the Charles Mingus product that was released because I have never
seen it all in one store in the old world. And to see this whole list,
some live recording, "I didn't know he did that." That's what we are trying
to create. The other approach of how does it become more of an educational
site? We're throwing all of our properties of Jazzschoool.com,
Jazzfest.com, Jazzauction.com.
We created a global jazz calendar that every live jazz concert anywhere
in the world is listed, linked. You can get information about the venue,
the artists, tickets, times, anything you want to have about jazz. In
that sense, it becomes a very powerful media site. Luckily because of
all the relationships we have, whether it is Intel or Apple or AOL or
Launch.com, all these online players where we can get traffic, Jazze is
becoming the default button for jazz and in that sense, we are really
able to follow the mission that I've been on since day one, which is expanding
the audience.
FJ:
Do you foresee a festival happening in Los Angeles, comparable to the
Bell Atlantic in New York? And when do you foresee that coming to fruition?
MICHAEL
DORF: Thanks for asking that, Fred. Yes, I am already working on it. (Long
pause) Hesitation, dot, dot, mumble, mumble, dot, dot, possibly, late
summer 2000? Dot, dot, who knows? I would love to create the Hollywood
Jazz Festival. I've been intrigued with the Santa Monica Airport, thinking
how cool taking over the airport and doing a festival out there would
be, since they hardly have any planes (MTV has done their Movie Award
there). I've been taken out to the city of Brea, where they would love
me to do some shit out there.
FJ:
Brea? Stop the presses. Man, I am in the thick of Brea. Orange County,
my kind of town: old and quiet.
MICHAEL
DORF: Yeah (laughing), putting on festivals is what we know how to do
very well. Having this access to this musical community makes it easy
for us to be a festival producer. In New York, Bell Atlantic is our main
sponsor of the jazz fest and as you know, Fred, they are in contract to
buy GTE.
FJ:
Let's not tell the world. I might want to get in on some of that GTE stock.
MICHAEL
DORF: (Laughing) There is every likelihood that if we have another good
successful 2000, we'd be looking at certainly a big sponsored festival
for 2001 with them. We have our sights on doing a jazz festival or a big
festival here. It's certainly a part of our equation.
FJ:
Will you continue the Jazz Awards? After all, it is equally paramount
to recognize the jazz musicians.
MICHAEL
DORF: The Awards was such a huge success from the artistic side. Did it
turn around and sell more records? Was it a financial success for the
producer? That I can tell you, no. We ate a lot of money doing it. It
was extremely rewarding. Horace Silver said it best the first year, "It's
just nice to be appreciated." In a sense, it was extremely rewarding.
I'm not sure what, I don't know how far the impact went, so I am hoping,
well, what we're doing for 2000, is we have basically partnered with Billboard
and BET and the Jazz Awards is going to be part of the large conference
they are trying to create in Washington DC and we've removed ourselves
from the whole nominating process and committee and the whole producer
role. BET will be producing the Jazz Awards. Knit Media and Jazze will
be the online presenter of the Awards. I have pulled myself a little back
from it. I wasn't necessarily seeing the value and I'm not sure it was
worth the effort. The question is can I do it more efficiently in a more
interactive online environment. We're involved in that way. I think this
has more greater reach. We're putting our energy more into that, Fred.
I think it will be more effective in the end.
FJ:
What does the future of jazz look like through Michael Dorf's eyes?
MICHAEL
DORF: The future of jazz, I think that jazz means a lot of things to a
lot of people. The profile of the word jazz has always had a higher art
to it, a higher value to it. That's going to pay off for a lot of the
players. Whether it's more jazz in GAP commercials or Lexus ads, which
would certainly seem more in the '90s than ever before to, which obviously
translates into financial rewards for those composers who are getting
those gigs. I think being a jazz artist is not going to be this struggle
for some people that it was in the '70s and '80s and '90s. Jazz is an
international language, much more so than rock. How do you define classical?
I've heard people say American classical music is really jazz or it's
country. And what is country in America is not country in Bolivia. What
is nice about jazz is that it is truly an international translated musical
language. With the globalization of technology, I think the opportunity
for having a much larger audience is there. I see the whole market around
jazz flourishing. While it is good for the business side, that flows back
to the artist. It only offers more creativity opportunities and more support
for the creative artists. We stand to be in better shape. I really believe
that technology is going to be the ace here for the jazz industry and
the artist. It's a huge opportunity. What is done in the creative community,
that's on the backs of the artists. My role is to just bring a bigger
artist to it and create the stage. I only build stages. It is the artist
on stage that has got to do his job. I have a high degree of confidence
in the artists that we've seen and worked with to take advantage of the
bigger audience and this bigger stage.
FJ:
It's been a good year for the Knitting Factory.
MICHAEL
DORF: Yeah, it's been a great year for us. I think 2000, 2001 are going
to be phenomenal. Finally, we will see of this stuff in the business plan,
pop and come true. Yeah.
Fred
Jung is Jazz Weekly's Editor-In-Chief and Interview Specialist. Comments?
Email
Fred.