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The Revivalist In The New York Times

Lenny Kravitz, Grace Jones, Lauryn Hill, Lion Babe, Thundercat, SZA & More Rock The Afropunk Festival 2015 in Brooklyn, NY.

The Revivalist has made The New York Times in a piece on founder and new school jazz visionary Meghan Stabile that examines the evolution of the website and its tireless founder one note at a time. Following her from gig to gig, Times writer John Leland gets the skinny on her busy schedule as well as a bit of her past and what it's like to be the one-woman army behind a musical revolution. For Stabile, who began in earnest as a bartender, the journey has been more of a dogfight than the Cinderella story it might seem from the outside; having her ideas stolen and having to fight for respect in the relative boys club of music and concert promotion has hardened her exterior.

Stabile came into the game eager to change the landscape of relative anonymity that awaited musicians primed to build their careers in a genre sometimes considered archaic and often associated with inaccessibility or the pretense of musical purists - things that usually have little if anything to do with the musicians responsible for the music. She has helped to bring those people - many from the hip-hop generation - and their congruous artistic sensibilities to the fore without compromising for the whims of the establishment or fear of the world's reluctance to accept their evolving sound. Armed with a label deal from Blue Note Records, Meghan Stabile prepares to curate the next generation of releases in a genre whose history is as rich and troubled as the nation from which it sprang as she shepherds the youngest and brightest musical innovators unpacking in New York City. Check a bit of the story below to read more on Meghan Stabile and her quest to Revive Da Live.

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.”

>>>Read the full story on Meghan Stabile in the New York Times