Destination: OUT is a website dedicated to adventurous jazz. We highlight startling and fresh music that upends the polite musical clichés of the genre. Our typical jazz offerings might sound more like rock, psychedelia, funk, classical, ambient, or electronic music. This music is both savage and beautiful. You won’t hear these tracks other places because we feature music that’s largely out-of-print. You may think you don’t like jazz – but you might think differently once you hear the selections on our site.

The website has been praised by The New Yorker, BBC Radio, Wired, The New York Times, and The Wire. We’re thrilled to transition from the virtual to the real and partner with the Salt Space for our Loft/Lab jazz concert series. Venues for live jazz in Manhattan have been steadily shrinking, so we're happy to buck that trend and offer more adventurous jazz in the city. Located in the old Tin Pan Alley district, the Salt Space is the ideal location for a jazz revival.

Destination: OUT’s Loft/Lab jazz series aims to recreate the feel and excitement of the great jazz lofts of the 1970s. It'll be a lab where adventurous musicians can try out new ideas, configurations, and compositions. It'll serve up live music without a net. We're keeping the prices low and only featuring our favorite acts.  It'll be curated with the same hand-picked care as the site. We're proud to kick things off with a concert from saxophonist Joe Giardullo. He’s a formidable talent whose shows are legendary to those in the know. His music is also immediate and accessible enough to win over folks who know little about the genre. We hope you’ll take advantage of this rare opportunity to see Joe and get turned on to his music.

-Jeff Jackson and Jeff Golick, Destination: OUT

Written by Neil Brown

As an Advisor to Monthly Design Review, it is a true pleasure to host the New York City "conversation" on the third Thursday of each month at the Salt Space.

Each month, I lock up the building around midnight and walk up Broadway to catch the subway home. Each month as I stroll through the greatest city I revel in the fact that I'm watching a new generation of creative, passionate individuals discuss how we can change our world. How we can impact our world. Positive impact.

Diverse backgrounds. Diverse skill sets. Diverse professions. We come together and wonder how we can work together. We wonder how we can influence. We discuss who we are. What drives us. Why we believe what we believe.

Each month I sit in awe as I listen to the hearts of 15 or 20 young, creative individuals passionately pursuing a life of worth. A life of impact.

We spend much time discussing why. Now I wonder how we will impact our world. Now I wonder what will we do.

Written by Leann Boyd

My older child prefers carrots to cookies. When given the choice, he picks carrots every time. This is to say nothing of my personal triumph as a parent or strong example of healthy eating habits. (I will usually pick the cookie—especially if it's oatmeal raisin.)

Ezra loves carrots because bunnies eat carrots and bunnies are cool. “Momma, I want to eat carrots like a bunny.” A few weeks ago at story time, the theme was bunnies. We read bunny books and sang bunny songs. We hopped like bunnies and made bunny ear headbands. We ate carrots. My son eats carrots because of what he learned and practiced and saw others practice at story time.

I am new to the stay-at-home mom deal. The contrast of a professional career against the demands of full-time parenting was startling at first. My children will not formally evaluate my performance at the end of each term. I feel the pressure of evaluating myself weekly, daily, hourly. Being at home with two people who need so much has drawn my attention to the beauty of living in community. I need to converse with adults. I need to give my children a safe platform to practice the social scripts we have rehearsed at home. I need to know that I am not the only one who has trouble or feels overjoyed by things that seems small to others.

Our family is not a self-contained unit. We need community. We have found a little bit of the community that is so vital to our family at Big City Story Time. Every first and third Friday, I pack up the boys and head to the SALT space to build relationships with other families. Story time has become an event to which we all look forward. At each story time, we read books centered around a theme. (Bunnies, ABC's, City Life, etc.) We sing songs, make a craft, and have a snack. But we also play and learn and teach and talk and love each other. We share stories and experiences that are shaping the people we are to become. Big City Story Time is meant to be a service to families—our own and those in our neighborhood. All caretakers of preschool children are invited to join us as we grow together every first and third Friday at 1160 Broadway, 5th floor from 10:30-11:30 A.M. Currently we have, on average, 7 families who participate. We look forward to meeting you and your family and sharing our lives and experiences with you.

Written by Neil Brown

Each issue of Monthly Design Review will examine different ways in which design can drive social change. For the first issue, we invited some friends to join us in sharing a personal turning point – a moment that changed our view of design.

Monthly Design Review is spearheaded by Tin-Ho Chow and Aaron Perry-Zucker of Big New Ideas LLC. This publication was started as an advisory program for Big New Ideas LLC to help steer the design studio towards engaging in meaningful, world-changing projects. In the process we had many conversations with designers, entrepreneurs, community organizers, non-profits, etc, about our shared understanding of design as a vehicle for social change and our various efforts trying to get others to understand this. Soon we realized that this conversation was important and should be made available to the public after it’s had a chance to be edited.

Every third Thursday of each month, the Salt Space hosts conversations facilitated by the management and/or advisory board of Monthly Design Review. These meetings are held across the country in various cities, including Providence, San Francisco, and New York, with the goal of developing a global community of designers and individuals focused on positive change for their own local communities.

So that’s Monthly Design Review: a monthly discussion concerning the design of businesses, campaigns, non-profits, social movements and ideas. We seek to create a broader understanding of how design is changing the world. Please join the conversation at the Salt Space.

Written by Grace Hwang

As the Salt Space continues to define its identity as a contemporary community art space, we solicited drawings and photographs from the streets and squares of New York for a ‘community exhibition’. An initial 349 drawings and 293 photographs were collected from this unusual call for proposals asking different communities in NYC for their participation and response to the question:

"What would you draw if you had one second for every year you’ve been alive?"

Modified granny carts-turned-art carts loaded with luscious Rives printmaking paper, charcoal pencils, stopwatches, and a can of fixative galavanted about Central Park, Washington Square, Tompkins Square, (and 4 other locations) with speakers blaring a playlist to provoke curiosity if not downright disarm NY-ers from their 9 to 5 workday. Asking people to sketch one second for the amount of years they’ve been alive was inspired by an idea Noah Ramey had as he turned 12 this year and calls it, appropriately: The 12-Second Sketch.

The second part of the experiment was a photo project, the mission: "Find and photograph “purity in the city.”

‘Purity in the City’ was initially a personal photo project of Neil Brown‘s that he graciously let us appropriate on a larger scale, that involved taking 25 white balloons from Riverside Park to The Highline to Coney Island.

The installation was collaboratively designed and built in three days by a team of volunteers, incorporating a hanging system of twine weighted by water balloons. Viewers are encouraged to become participants by arranging images or contributing responses of their own. Together we are organizing and defining communities as temporal, fluid, dynamic, interconnected; based on but not limited to demographics, experiences, memories, needs.