Jazz is essentially live music. Musicians spontaneously negotiate and renegotiate their relationships with one another, the material they play, and the audiences who journey with them. That’s not to say that recordings can’t tell us a lot about it—and in fact the evolution of recording formats maps pretty well onto the history of jazz. The brief playing time of 78s, which typically held one tune per side, drove a focus on pithy songs and required soloists to get right to the point. Long-playing albums gave musicians more room to make expansive artistic statements of all sorts. CDs helped push the jazz marketplace toward reissues and archival releases by using their even greater capacity to load up new versions of old albums with extra tracks and multiple takes; soon new generations of fans began to explore not only the canonical artists of previous eras but also all the might-have-beens. Digital files have made nearly everything available, but the recordings are also next to worthless from a commercial standpoint.
“I try to see the low overhead of tapes in a couple different ways,” says Cross. “It is definitely freeing, in the sense that you can stretch your dollars a bit further. You’re not sinking everything into the hopes of one big payoff, and that also plays into a conscious decision I made when starting the label: to see it as a long game. Also, I will say that releasing tapes was not entirely motivated by low overhead. I wanted to reach a younger audience, and people who wouldn’t necessarily care or listen to free jazz/improv. By presenting it on tape, my hope is that it could change the dynamics of how someone might interact with the music. There are a lot of stereotypes of a typical jazz fan, for better or worse—I’m just hoping maybe I can broaden the audience a bit by presenting it in a slightly unconventional manner.”
