Join Me For Jazz: Knicks in 5 — A Great Day in Harlem

Five sessions. Five boroughs. One playoff run worth building a whole arc around.

Knicks in 5: A Victory Lap in Jazz is a five-session run at Kissa Kissa, July through November, each night repping a different borough. We start with Manhattan, and I thought the best way to open this series was through an iconic photo that helped define the genre.

August 12, 1958. Art Kane, a first-time photographer on assignment for Esquire, got 57 jazz musicians to show up at 10am on a stoop at 17 East 126th Street in Harlem. No small feat — most of them likely had been working clubs the night before. What resulted is a photo you’ve probably seen even if you don’t know jazz. A Great Day in Harlem. Count Basie’s hat getting stolen by neighborhood kids. Thelonious Monk in a plaid sport coat. Charles Mingus staring dead into the lens.

One thing worth naming that makes this night a bit sobering: the last person standing on that stoop has transitioned. Sonny Rollins passed this May, at 95 years of age. There’s nobody left from that photograph now. That’s not a small thing to carry into a room built around this photograph, and I’m not going to pretend it isn’t there. Rollins’s horn shows up on three of the night’s six records. We play them all with respect, reverence, and joy.

Here’s how I built the set: every one of these six records was cut in Manhattan, close enough to that August morning that the tunes were likely still living in these musicians’ hands — either played around the city in the months surrounding the shoot, or recorded in its wake. And every LP has at least one other person from that stoop playing on it. Stand in front of the photograph long enough and you start to see it’s not 57 strangers who showed up once. It’s a gathering of people who already knew each other. Tonight’s set is that stoop, on wax.

Six records. Multiple people playing on multiple people’s projects. Namely drummer Jo Jones, bassist Oscar Pettiford, and sax player Sonny Rollins. That’s not a coincidence I built in. That’s just what Manhattan’s jazz scene was in those days: small enough that everybody was on everybody’s record.

This is the first of five. Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island, and Brooklyn are still to come, each with its own set, its own story. Manhattan just had to go first — it’s so central to the story of jazz in NYC.

Kissa Kissa is a Japanese-style high-fidelity vinyl listening bar in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The system carries everything — the room noise on an old recording, the specific way a horn breathes into a mic in 1957. The space is intimate. Come ready to sit with it.

Reservation availability may be sparse, but please know that walk-ins are welcome!

I’ll see you in the room.

— JP