Nate Chinen writes about New Haven's Firehouse 12-a new music jazz venue:
A couple of hours earlier the main space at Firehouse 12 had seemed
an unlikely place for a jazz gig. With its bamboo floors and
glass-walled control booth, it clearly revealed its core identity as a
studio. But then stackable chairs were wheeled out of a closet
(actually an isolation booth), and speakers were set up along one wall.
Unhurriedly supervising this routine transformation was Nick Lloyd,
Firehouse 12’s owner, series programmer and chief recording engineer.
“The recording industry is in an absolute shambles right now,” he said
in the green room, a few steps from his upstairs office, which was once
a hayloft. So while the initial aim was to open a recording studio, “I
knew that a studio was not by itself a really viable business plan,
especially in New Haven. And that this was not going to be a
major-revenue business, but having a bar would soften the blow.”
He
said the cocktail lounge was responsible for just over half his
revenue. (One measure of its success: Carlos Wells, who has been with
the bar since it opened, has won the best bartender award in each of
the last three reader polls in The New Haven Advocate.)
The
cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum, Mr. Lloyd’s partner in Firehouse 12 Records,
was quick to acknowledge that the bar and studio revenue made the label
possible. But he also described an uncommonly attentive sort of
stewardship for what’s essentially a niche within a niche. “It’s not a
huge audience, but there is enough of an audience to create livable
structures,” he said over dinner at one of New Haven’s storied
pizzerias. “You have to apply a lot of knowledge and talent, and
proceed with care.”
In a sense, that approach has driven
Firehouse 12 from the beginning. Mr. Lloyd had run a small studio in
Park Slope, Brooklyn, before moving to New Haven, originally to pursue
a Ph.D. in music theory at Yale. He discovered the former firehouse,
which had long ago fallen into disrepair.
The city was seeking
proposals for the space; his, more or less an outline for Firehouse 12,
made the grade. What followed was an extensive renovation by an
architecture firm with offices next door. John Storyk, the acclaimed
acoustician and designer responsible for Jimi Hendrix’s
Electric Lady Studios, consulted on the recording facilities. In 2004,
fulfilling a residency stipulation in his contract with the city, Mr.
Lloyd moved into a loft upstairs with his wife, Megan Craig, an artist
and philosophy professor.
Early in 2005 the studio opened for
business, complete with a large-format analog mixing console and full
digital capabilities. Along with jazz and classical musicians its
clients have included rock bands like the National, from Brooklyn, and
Stephen Kellogg and the Sixers, from Northampton, Mass.
More