Ms. Stabile, who stands five feet tall, with a sweep of straightened brown hair pinned and tucked behind one ear, is a woman on a curious mission: to make jazz matter to the hip-hop generation, and to do so as a young woman in a jazz world dominated by older men, at a time when both jazz itself and the recording industry feel decreasingly relevant. In the last year and a half, she has emerged as a presence around the city — booking, promoting, cajoling, advising and herding young musicians, many of whom are still finding their way.When she came to New York in September 2006, a few credits shy of graduation from the Berklee College of Music in Boston, she had immodest plans. She wanted to change things, she said. Since then, she said, she has had men in the business hit on her, steal her ideas, treat her like a little girl. And she has made them come around, winning over supporters and mentors throughout the business.
“I said what I was going to do, and I did exactly what I said,” she said. “And people have seen that now.”
Last month, she took a step up from the underground, signing a deal to curate and produce albums for Blue Note Records, under her own imprint — a signal accomplishment for someone with no experience as a producer.
But it has not been easy. In conversations over the last month, she several times asked herself a version of the same question: How did I survive?
“I don’t know,” she said one day in her sixth-floor walk-up apartment in Harlem, which she shares with two other women, and which also doubles as the office for her one-person company, Revive Music. “Mentally, it’s gotten a lot better. Definitely there were times when I questioned what I was doing. There were a lot of nights when I went home crying.”
Another evening, as she picked at a salmon fillet in SoHo, the question led her to a one-word reminder that appears on her smartphone every morning: “Sacrifice.”
