Groove Collective

The Giant Step club, very early on, started mixing live music with DJ sets. This all started with flutist Richard Worth, who was originally from London and understood that we were trying to be similar to London’s Dingwalls Club. Richard started to invite other live musicians down to the club, and word started getting out about Giant Step. When we eventually ended up in the basement of the Metropolis Cafe, we had a solid core group of live musicians that would jam with the DJ - Richard Worth on flute, Gordon “Nappy G” Clay on percussion, Genji Siraisi on drums, Chris Theberge on congas, Itaal Shur on keyboards, Jonathan Maron on bass.

The popularity of the club created some tension with the venue owners. Upstairs from us was Metropolis Cafe - a very fancy, beautiful, and expensive restaurant. After a certain hour on any given Thursday, all the people entering the building would be heading downstairs to Giant Step, and the restaurant would be pretty sparse. So the restaurant’s management decided that they should bring in their own jazz musicians upstairs to attract more people, at no charge (while we were charging for admission to the club downstairs).

The restaurant hired a group of jazz musicians, who showed up to play their first week only to discover that there was no audience. The restaurant musicians (Bill Ware, Fabio Morgera, Josh Roseman and Jay Rodriguez) noticed the throngs of beautiful women piling downstairs into Giant Step. So at the end of their shift, they decided to head downstairs to check out Giant Step - which was, of course, packed with young, beautiful people, with live musicians on the stage. The musicians from upstairs would then bring their instruments down and join the downstairs crew. And that was the start of Groove Collective and how the 10 of them got together.

They were encouraged to form a “real” band and Maurice and Jonathan offered to manage them and put on weekly shows at different locations. They evolved from being the “Giant Step posse” to the Groove Collective. They went on to sign with Reprise Records, and their debut album was partly recorded at the Giant Step club, produced by Steely Dan’s producer, Gary Katz. Their second album was released on Giant Step Records, and they continued performing for many years.