SteepleChase Records

In August of 1972, Nils Winther was an enterprising young man with a taste for jazz and a talent for taping that he deployed liberally at the local club, Jazzhus Montmarte, in Copenhagen, Denmark. When Jackie McLean scheduled a multi-night engagement at the club, Winther naturally sought to record the saxophonist. Finding the atmosphere congenial, McLean — with a nudge from Kenny Drew, a childhood friend from New York who played piano in the club — agreed. Winther captured the entire run.

By today’s standards, the equipment — heavy reel-to-reel tapes that Winther lugged up a staircase to a room where he had rigged a connection to the performance space below — was crude. The sound quality, however, was good — and the music, superb. Supported by Drew and two Danish musicians, bassist Bo Stief and drummer Alex Riel, McLean fashioned some exhilarating improvisations on tunes by composers as diverse as Charlie Chaplin to Charlie Parker. McLean was so happy with the result that a week after the gig, he came by the club, trudged up the staircase and told a surprised Winther that he thought the material should be released on record.

“I said, ‘I don’t know about that; I don’t have any money,’” Winther recalled in a late-August Zoom conversation from his home in Virum, Denmark. “But then we talked. His friend and I, we made a contract. I got a grant to study at the university, which was enough money to make 500 LPs, and that’s what I did.” Already trading tapes with like-minded fans around the world, he applied his networking skills to seeking distribution, finding a global market that exceeded his expectations. He borrowed money and pressed an additional 500 LPs. The album was Live At Montmartre. With it, SteepleChase Records was born. - Phillip Lutz - DownBeat Nov.29 2022