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Adam Schatz, 23-year old graduate of the New School's Jazz Program here in NYC, has just scored a coup by raising $75,000 through KickStarter for his massive project called Search & Restore that's attempting -- through video -- to document over 200 jazz performances throughout the City next year:

There are a couple of interesting things about Search and Restore's proposed jazz-video project. One is that it doesn't entirely benefit Mr. Schatz, or at least not directly. He's convinced that the jazz audience needs to be more hungry, and he's spreading information to create the hunger. "My mission is to bring people together around art," he proclaimed. "We don't care who you are or how old you are. We just want you to get down."

The other is that he doesn't think of it as an archive. Older jazz culture is document-obsessed; Mr. Schatz isn't. "The point of this is not to preserve, but to expose," he said. "And with 200 shows we can come pretty damn close to encapsulating the community." Each artist will have a breakout page. The page for, say, the trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, might have video of his own band and videos of the three or four other groups he's currently playing in.

"It's something to move through," as Mr. Schatz put it, "so that you can live and breathe within the scene, become psyched by it, see how different people play differently in different bands."

He's certainly done a great job getting the word out through the above article in the NY Times, an article in the Wall Street Journal in May, The Village Voice back in February '09, and with this interview in The Gothamist in March '08.

Congrats to Adam and Search & Restore! We're looking forward to perusing many of these performances online...

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