In March 2024, we entered the famed Fattoria Musica studio in Osnabrück, Germany,
to record the fifth album of The New York Second:
Room for Other People
“We have to make room for other people.
It’s a wheel. You get on. You go to the end.
And then someone else has the same opportunity to go to the end.”
– Vivian Maier, nanny & photographer
The music for this album was inspired by the photography of Vivian Maier, the ‘nanny photographer’.
Maier spent her life making photographs alongside her work as a nanny, particularly on the streets of Chicago and New York, producing hundreds of thousands of stunning photographs, that she … stored in boxes. And that brought her worldwide fame only posthumously, after they were discovered at auction.
Harald Walkate and Tom Beek collaborated on the design of the two previous CDs by The New York Second where they discovered a shared passion for Vivian Maier’s photography. What appealed to them, apart from the evocative aesthetics of the (predominantly) black-and-white images, was the fact that Maier seemed to photograph mainly for herself – she shared the photos only in a very small circle of friends.
She seemed particularly drawn to the process: taking to the streets of New York and Chicago, armed with her Rolleiflex, developing films, selecting and printing the ‘right’ picture, and then stowing it away in one of the hundreds of boxes she dragged with her from family to family for whom she worked as a nanny. Ultimately to be bought at auction, shortly before her death, by a collector who realised what a phenomenal collection he had acquired and made them known to the world.
Another intriguing aspect is that Maier, as a true street photographer, captured thousands of other people on camera, but in doing so – according to biographer Ann Marks – mainly tried to reaffirm her own identity. The camera, not as window to the world, but a mirror for the soul.
In this, Harald and Tom discovered parallels with how they experience music: music as a journey of discovery to better understand the world, as a way to shape complexity and to penetrate deeper into the experience of being present: being present in being related. Free independence does not exist, it is interdependent.
Like Maier, the musicians – following the composer’s lead – put themselves in a position to ‘capture’ reality. Not passively, but with imagination; from the desire to participate in it themselves, to be of significance too. Not just to see it as it is but also to see it better than it is. Perhaps this is the romance of the artist: the expectation that reality can be made (more) beautiful, by rearranging and reshaping it yourself.
The album was released at a concert at PHIL Haarlem in The Netherlands, February 1st 2025. From October 2024 we have been releasing individual tracks as singles, accompanied by the Vivian Maier photos that inspired them, on the streaming platforms. The full album will be available on the streaming services in Q2 2025. The full album is already available on BandCamp.
Listen to the tracks released on Spotify so far:
- Room for other People,
- View of Île Saint-Louis,
- Location & Date Unknown,
- The Collectors Corner,
- 983 Third Avenue,
- Downstairs for Incoming Trains,
- and the latest release, The Class Photograph
Ensemble
Tom Beek – tenor saxophone | Lorenzo Buffa – double bass | Mark Alban Lotz – flutes | Teus Nobel – trumpet | Max Sergeant – drums | Vincent Veneman – trombone | Harald Walkate – piano | Rob Waring – vibraphone
