By Saby Reyes-Kulkarni

Steven Joerg is a jazz missionary. Founder of AUM Fidelity, a Broolyn-based independent label that for the past decade has churned out some of the most vital, cutting-edge jazz around, Joerg wants to make jazz relevant to a young audience. He knows firsthand, however, what a daunting task he has ahead—since even he wasn’t interested in the genre during his formative music-listening years.

“None of my friends were really into jazz,” says Joerg. “I listened to some jazz in high school, but I grew up on rock. I got really into punk rock during the early ’80s, an incredibly special time for great, great American bands—like The Minutemen, who remain one of my favorites.”

Sifting through the label’s catalog, it’s odd to think that the man who now possesses a passion for putting out challenging records by the likes of David S. Ware, Kidd Jordan, Daniel Carter, Joe Morris and Roy Nathanson is actually a relative latecomer to experimental jazz. Joerg’s journey from Zeppelin’s misty-mountain Kashmiri vistas to inter-dimensional pre-Mayan portals as charted in sound by bassist William Parker began, fittingly enough, with John Coltrane.

“I got a Coltrane record, a Monk record and a Rollins record in high school,” he recalls. “I just did a little dabble-do. But I didn’t fully grasp it all at the time. Then I had a bit of a revelation with Blue Train. After that, I got into Sun Ra in college, because it was a bit more adventurous. I was really intrigued by this whole mythos he created around himself, but I was still listening predominantly to underground rock—what later became known as indie rock.”

When Joerg first migrated to New York from his native Chicago in 1989, he worked at the Bar/None label. That eventually led to him running Homestead Records, which at the time boasted a varied independent rock-oriented roster. During Joerg’s tenure, the label ventured into jazz territory, a move that timed well with growing interest in groundbreaking jazz among intrepid rock fans during the mid-’90s. Joerg has since worked largely with a core group of New York-area musicians whose roots in the local arts community run deep.

Since being turned on to jazz, Joerg has felt convinced that listeners from any background will be struck by its inherent power and beauty as long as they’re listening with an open heart. 

“Anybody from a small child to a grandma can enjoy this music—and would—if exposed from the right angle,” he says. “Obviously, I’ve listened to a lot of it, so it’s not oppressive to me at all. I mean, I’ve seen some free jazz that I don’t like, but there’s a ton of melody, tons of harmony and really, really profound rhythms.”

Though AUM artists like William Parker and Triptych Myth are certainly pushing envelopes in several directions, recognizable elements like swing remain intact, however warped they might initially sound. Plus, AUM recordings tend to have a visceral quality. They may be abstract and a bit out there, but as Joerg suggests, this art form can convey a passion that belies the perception that it’s a coldly cerebral, self-involved post-modern masturbatory abrasion.

“The musicians that I work with want to get their music heard,” explains Joerg. “They’re going to play the music regardless of whether there are 10 people or 10 thousand in the audience because they’ve devoted their whole lives to doing it. There’s not even much grumbling amongst this crew of people; there’s a realistic understanding of what the world outside is like. They’ve been through it already. They were here in New York in the 1970s and ’80s and saw a lot of [creative activity].”
For his part, Joerg perpetually finds himself having to mirror the same tenacity of spirit shown by his stable of artists. Consistent with the industry as a whole, his record sales are down, yet he’s scheduled in 2008 to release more titles than he ever has in a single year.

“Being able to continue to find people and expose them in this new realm of information overload, is becoming more difficult than ever to get through given the resources that an indie label is faced with,” Joerg says. “You’ve got X amount of money: Are you going to make a beautiful record and package it beautifully? You’ve just got to keep pushing.”