Giant Step Club: The Beginning
1990–1995
Excerpt from an interview with Maurice Bernstein, originally published in Love Injection Fanzine, Issue No. 4 (May 2015).
Maurice Bernstein: I was working at a restaurant, and they were quiet on Sunday nights, so the owner asked me if I wanted to start a party there. I was like, Yep! I tried to get Tony Humphries to be my resident DJ. They weren’t interested; I couldn’t offer them the money they wanted. The owner of the restaurant then turned around and said, Ah, never mind. I don’t want to do this party. But I’d already decided I was going to do one, so I decided to set one up on my own. I found a DJ out of Brooklyn. He was a reel-to-reel DJ, one of those old-school house reel-to-reel [guys]. His name was Ernie Kendall. He was kind of one of those legendary DJs that no one ever knew, if you know what I mean. [So] I started a party called House of Love down at a place called Big Haus, where Mark Kamins was the DJ. It was on a Monday night. That was my first sort of party in New York. Ended those at the Red Zone and then did them at Nell’s and then M.K.
[Love Injection] And they were still called -
That was called House of Love. Then I started doing parties under my name, but I really wanted to do jazz dance parties. A friend of mine told me about some jazz musicians who needed some work. When she said their names… it was basically the J.B.’s, James Brown’s crew. [So] I started getting them gigs playing at my parties. I needed a bigger venue for them because they wanted more money, so I approached S.O.B.’s about doing the party there, but I wanted to give it a name. I called it the Groove Academy. Jonathan Rudnick, who was doing the publicity at S.O.B.’s, whom I’d met before, was very excited and interested. After we did the first one with the J.B.’s, we did them with Bootsy Collins and then George Clinton, and then he became my partner. I wanted to also do a jazz dance party, so we started that up as a weekly, and we called that Giant Step. That was September, 1990.
[Love Injection] Is there a direct reference that that name comes from?
Yes. It comes from two places. The first place is it was influenced by John Coltrane’s Giant Steps. We dropped the “s” because we didn’t want to get into trouble. It was also a statement that we were taking a giant step away from what was happening musically. Back then you had the underground house clubs that didn’t attract a mainstream crowd, unlike today. Not a lot of regular people would go to those clubs. It’s not like now, where it’s mainstream music. It was really just Europeans and Japanese and heads that would go to those places. Everyone else was going to clubs like Nell’s and M.K., [which weren’t about] the music, but about being seen. We wanted to make a statement that it wasn’t just about being seen.
[Love Injection] So that’s when Giant Step started.
That’s when Giant Step started and nobody came.[laughs] I was under the very naive thought that, in a city like New York, if you play great music, everyone will come because you’re doing something. I knew DJ Smash from Save the Robots. What I was impressed by with him was he could mix literally anything. When I got to talking to him, I found out that he was a massive jazz head, so that worked. He started and then Richard Worth, who was also from England and understood what we were trying to do came along and starting playing the flute with Smash. Then other musicians started joining him and, before long, we had this sort of mix of live music and DJs. Suddenly there was this very, very unique vibe. It wasn’t until we moved the party, about a year in, to the basement of a restaurant in Union Square that it all clicked. Eight months into us doing this party it became the hottest shit in town. It’s amazing how it just works after a while. We had [lines] down the block, everyone wanted to be there, actresses [wanted to get in]. It was like, Woah! How did this happen? Record companies hangin’ out. It was the hot thing. Then you got bands from the UK coming over that we were launching, like Jamiroquai and the Brand New Heavies and Massive Attack. And you’ve got Gang Starr playin’ at the club and Guru Jazzmatazz and Digable Planets and Neneh Cherry. We were the epicenter of this musical movement, the avenue for it coming from the UK and out of the U.S. From there, we started discovering bands as well.
[Love Injection] What year was this, when it really popped?
It really popped in… the summer of 1991, and it just boomed for about four years. We were doing a thousand people [every] Thursday. It was ridiculous. Then we had our management company and we signed all these bands to major labels.
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