When he's not helping run global brokerage Newmark, Jimmy Kuhn can be found playing in a rock 'n' roll band along the East Coast.
Since the late 1990s, Kuhn, who serves as president and head of investor services for New York City-based Newmark, has been part of Square Feeet, a band that plays thematic tribute shows to the Beatles, Queen, the 50th anniversary of Woodstock and the 1990s. The group added the extra "e" to feet because the URL squarefeet.com already was in use.
"First it was a Newmark Band, then it was a hybrid and then finally 9 years ago, [former Newmark employee] David Katzman and I reconstituted the band with graduates of [Boston's] Berklee College of Music that were touring with Jefferson Starship," Kuhn wrote in an email.
Square Feeet has played casinos in New York and Pennsylvania, including Turning Stone near Syracuse, New York, and Tioga Downs Casino Resort in Nichols, New York. The band also has played shows in South Florida and for several benefits including one last month at The Cutting Room in New York City. That show was part of the concert to benefit the NYU Schack Diversity Fund connected to the New York University School of Professional Studies Schack Institute of Real Estate.
Kuhn, who’s played keyboard his whole life, said he rehearses with his bandmates, whom he described as “all professional musicians” with the exception of him - “the only guy with a job” - for three hours every week.
“This is my hobby,” he said in an interview recently after a Square Feeet performance at a benefit show. “It’s nothing to do with my job….Being up there [playing] is like a drug. It’s amazing. You forget about everything.”
Square Feeet started as a classic rock and pop cover band and morphed into a thematic rock band. Two members of Square Feeet, Apoena Frota and André Vasconcelos, along with Kuhn, have a separate music company called Ghidrah. Through Ghidrah, the trio penned a song called "Passenger Seat" released by Cathy Richardson of Jefferson Starship fame.