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The Knitting Factory is a New York City and Hollywood music club, originally specializing in jazz and experimental music.

It was opened in 1987 by Michael Dorf and Bob Appel, both from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Initially the Knitting Factory was supposed to be an art gallery with a performance space and cafe, as well as a home for experimental music. Michael Dorf was the sole owner from the inception through 1996. Michael Dorf moved the club to Tribeca and building the recording business festival business. He created KnitMedia, during the dot-com era, as the umbrella company to the Knitting Factory club in NY and soon to open state-of-the-art club in Los Angeles. By 1999 the company grew to over 100 employees. There is also a club in Los Angeles. For many years there was also an associated record label, Knitting Factory Records.

Michael Dorf founded the venue on Houston Street, almost equidistant between CBGB and the Bottom Line, in late February 1987. The club quickly emerged as a home for the sounds that did not neatly fit into the categories of jazz or rock. Artists like Sonic Youth, Cassandra Wilson, Yo La Tengo, Cecil Taylor, and Bill Frisell played there. From 1987 to 1994 the venue lived at 47 E. Houston Street (it is now at 74 Leonard Street, between Broadway and Church). The New York Times said of Michael Dorf in 1987, “The Knitting Factory has almost singlehandedly revised New York’s downtown arts scene in its first six months of operation. Presenting Jazz and improvised music, along with films, poetry, performance art and dance, it’s putting on affordable, genre-crossing double bills every night of the week.“^{[citation needed]} Rolling Stone Magazine said of club in 1991, “It’s rare for a club to act as a magnet for talent, drawing a new scene around itself. But in New York City, where the Knitting Factory has become synonymous with new music, that’s precisely what’s happening.”^{[citation needed]}

In 2007 The Knitting Factory and XMU (XM 43) forged an exclusive partnership for the XM channel to record and broadcast concerts from both Knitting Factory locations.

• Philippe Carles, André Clergeat, and Jean-Louis Comolli, Dictionnaire du jazz, Paris, 1994

• Downtown music
• List of record labels

• Official website
• michaeldorf.com
• Monthly Events Listings

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