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isterial Sonny Rollins in front of the
Williamsburg Bridge. Tony Bennett,
serene as the prince he is.
Katz is the first-call photographer of
jazz, but in the second decade of the
new millennium his name began to be
listed on jazz CDs as engineer. Many
people, myself included, first assumed
it was a different Jimmy Katz. But Katz
had become a self-taught engineer,
specializing in live recordings.
Jazz audiophiles have long confront-
ed a dilemma. Most of their favorite
albums are live recordings because, at
their best, live albums capture the raw
truth—the juice. Think of Bill Evans’s
Sunday at the Village Vanguard. The audi-
ence chatter and the clinking glasses
are fleeting, random events in time,
preserved for eternity along with the
music. But sonically, jazz audiophiles’
favorite albums are studio recordings
because, at their best, they have the
resolution. Think of almost any ECM
album recorded at Rainbow Studio in
Oslo by founder Manfred Eicher and
the great engineer Jan Erik Kongshaug.
Katz’s recordings give you both.
Speaking of juice, take Bop Juice: Live
at Smalls, by Ralph Lalama, recorded
at the cramped, cultish Greenwich
Village jazz dive and released on the
SmallsLIVE label in 2012. It makes you
sweat. Katz jams you into the crowd.
You are there, on the night. But you
also hear, with startling clarity, Lalama’s
tenor saxophone, squalling and blasting
about seven feet in front of you.
In January 2018, when Katz an-nounced the founding of Giant Step
Arts, a new 501(c)(3) nonprofit
organization, he said that GSA would
seek out artists on the leading edges
of jazz and offer them support free of
commercial pressures. The support
would include presenting a series of
live performances of artists’ premieres;
compensating the artists well; pre-
serving the concerts on CDs with
production, engineering, and photog-
raphy by Katz; providing the leader of
each session with 800 CDs and files
for 24-bit/96kHz downloads to sell
directly; allowing the artists to own the
master recordings; providing photos
and videos (by Katz) for promotional
use; and setting up PR support through
respected media firm Braithwaite &
Katz (no relation). It was an unprec-
edented concept.^1
“In the United States, there is inad-
equate support for the arts,” Katz told
me during an interview in New York.
“I’ve had this idea for many years but
could not implement it until I found a
group of donors who believed in me.
GSA has very low overhead. We have
a small team with a unique set of skills.I WORK WITH ARTISTS
WHO ARE READY
TO MAKE LARGE,
BOLD ARTISTIC
STATEMENTS.1 To contribute to Giant Step Arts, visit giantsteparts.
org/take-action.PHOTO: JIMMY KATZ
Eric Alexander, Doug Weiss, and Jonathan Blake at New York’s Jazz Gallery.