Rockwood Music Hall Starts a Record Label

Marcus Yam for The New York Times Johnny Marnell performing at Rockwood Music Hall in 2011.

For the last eight years, Ken Rockwood has served as an impresario and a mentor for scores of New York bands, giving them shows on the two stages at his Rockwood Music Hall in Lower Manhattan. Now he says he is taking the next step: he has started a record label.

“It just seems like a natural progression,” Mr. Rockwood, 47, said as he sat in his club. “I look at what happens here and I see an act that grows from stage one to stage two. I always think: ‘What’s next How can we continue’”

The first three releases from the new label, Rockwood Music Hall Recordings, will be released over the next six weeks, distributed mostly online through The Orchard.

On Tuesday, Mr. Rockwood released an album by Dumpster Hunter, a Brooklyn indie-rock group he has showcased for years at the club. The label will follow up with an instrumental album on April 23 by the drummer Mark Guiliana and his group Beat Music, which mixes elements of rock, electronic, dub and jazz. Then on May 2, the label will put out a live album by the songwriter Robbie Gil.

Mr. Rockwood, who in the 1990s was part of the duo Professor and Maryann, started his club as a small bar with a cramped stage on Allen Street in 2005, and has since taken two larger, adjacent spaces.

The club is known for its good acoustics and has become a favored performance space for Americana, bluegrass and rock acts. Among the artists who have played there are Lady Gaga, Mumford & Sons, Gary Clark Jr., and Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day.

But it is among lesser-known New York acts that Mr. Rockwood has developed a reputation as an artist-friendly club owner, who likes to mentor artists he believes in and often mixes the sound himself. He books several new and emerging acts a night on his smaller stage. “I consider the artist the customer, really,” he said. “It’s about how they are treated when they get here, how they sound on stage, can they hear themselves”

Mr. Rockwood said he expected the label to be as eclectic as the musicians he invites to perform. Among the artists with whom he is working are the singer-songwriter Sonya Kitchell and the R&B and funk group Aabaraki.

“The label represents what I like,” he said. “It feels like a labor of love so far. I have done everything myself.”