Bklyn Sounds: 3/28/2023 - 4/3/2023 + Union Pool’s ‘Free Tuesdays’

The Best Live Music Deal in Brooklyn + Shows: Nicole Mitchell / Glenn Underground + Jovonn / Caterina Barbieri / Kuniyuki / "Triple Canopy Culture Symposium" / Super Yamba salute Mamadou / Excepter...

By now, news is out that L’Rain is playing a freebie at Union Pool on Tuesday, March 28th, the latest in a series of free performances that have taken place at the Williamsburg club on almost every Tuesday in 2023. 

The idea that a major touring artist is playing a gratis/first-come-first-served show at a local hole-in-the-wall without a corporate underwriter, is the kind of event that can’t help but reframe the ever-widening divide currently invoked in conversations about live music: whether about rising concert-ticket prices at the top end of the pyramid, about the unholy guarantees of the creative 1%, about the record profits their corporate enablers are posting, or about everybody’s claims that this is just the way things are now. “WTF is going on?” ask people old enough to remember differently (see also Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine). And the fact that one counter-argument to “the way things are now” is unfolding at Union Pool, a club that only last summer suffered a catastrophic fire which easily could have shuttered it, seems more proof that the difference between the way things are and the way things could be is due less to economic inevitabilities, than to a lack of imagination, will-to-power, and social application. So maybe it’s worth appreciating what’s happening at the corner of Union and Meeker.

The deeper you engage Union Pool, the more it makes sense why sustaining a layered, community culture around the club might be paramount to its interests. The bar-venue hasn’t merely held on through a fire and pandemic, but — having predated all the neighborhood’s popular historical touchstones (opened in October 2000, it’s more of a “local” than Vice or Glasslands) — survived Williamsburg’s continually shifting social mores. Yes, its atmosphere helped birth the Brooklyn hipster and the neighborhood’s art-scuzz-rock scene, while gaining a national reputation as a hook-up den “horny Neverland” for the kids “coming up from behind.” 

Yet between the live acts in its intimate saloon-like performance space, and the impeccably DJ’d front-bar, Union Pool’s musical acumen never flatlined into commercial or artisanal normcore that devoured the rest of its neighborhood, nor fell down a fad-ish rabbit hole it did not already co-sign. You don’t come here for the latest in “poptimism.” Instead, with Rev. Vince Anderson as a weekly “dirty gospel” lynchpin so beloved someone made a documentary about him; with one of Brooklyn’s hardest working musicians, drummer Ryan Sawyer providing a steady presence (booking all the DJs, leading a quarterly improvised-music residency); and with a gig throughline that connects the primarily DIY performers, whether they bring experimental noise and soulful song-craft, new punk energy or roots-minded gravitas, Union Pool is an unmistakable community point of view. It also has an audience+space+moment connection that, in the words of Union Pool manager Anna Lopez, makes the club a “creative hub,” and not simply a venue.        

According to Lopez, Free Tuesdays is an off-shoot of a decade-long free Sundays program called “Summer Thunder” (co-produced with Greenpoint’s Academy Records) that takes place in Union Pool’s backyard. (Last summer, “Thunder” featured shows by, among others, Natural Information Society, Sister Nancy, Can singer Malcolm Mooney fronting an all-star band of improvisers, and a now-annual performance by the Sun Ra Arkestra.) There was actually a trial run of Free Tuesday shows in January of 2020; but in 2023, they simply decided to keep it going. Lopez says there was a desire to build an off-season version of “Summer Thunder” energy, “a way to bring people in and make the winter less sad, since it's been so depressing these past few years.” There was also a conscious view of the community’s current economic state, that “a lot of folks may have recently ended their seasonal jobs” and that the shows could “provide a place where you won't have to spend a shit ton of money.” This is an acknowledgement of music not as entertainment but a sustaining need. 

Yet somebody still has to pay for it, right? Who might that be? Lopez is less clear about that - in fairness, we did this as an email back-and-forth - but the obvious answer is that everyone works together to make Free Tuesdays happen. “Sometimes we have sponsors, which we like to keep local,” she writes. “But sometimes we just love and are fans of those that approach us with the idea (ex: L'Rain) and we make it work.” When I follow-up to make sure that it is not the artists who foot the bill, Lopez is unequivocal: “They [artists] all get paid!”

A few things to note here: Whatever sponsors are on-board (usually beer and booze) are unobtrusive and left on the flyer; I’ve never seen a “brand presence” at Union Pool shows. L’Rain, the musical project of Brooklyn-born/-raised Taja Cheek, has played Union Pool multiple times, and did so long before 2021’s Fatigue marked her as an international star. And that sense of long-standing relationships driving how business is done here, reminds me of something I once heard Meshell Ndegeocello say from the Union Pool stage she was sharing with saxophonist James Brandon Lewis and Sawyer on drums in January 2022. “If Ryan calls, I’m there.” Such accord and loyalty seem to go a long way. 

They’re also reflected in how many artists choose to play Union Pool, when bigger, slightly more profitable rooms are on offer. And, of late, who’s played free shows. (Just this year, Free Tuesdays has hosted such potential headliners as KeiyaA, Ted Leo and Downtown Boys, among others.) And community music does not get made in a vacuum. Lopez points out that one of her colleagues at Union Pool, Suzanne Cub, runs a weekly food pantry out of the space (“every Wednesday — come by at 9:45a, we can always use a hand!”) Again, music and musicking spaces as a part of daily existence.  

Lopez says that the Free Tuesdays series is “just getting started.” Union Pool has already announced bills for the first Tuesday of the next four months, curated by the great electric guitarist Ava Mendoza, co-produced with upstate’s legendary program Creative Music Studio. The triple bills will feature a wonderful cornucopia of local improvisers, experimentalists and rhythmalists, including 75 Dollar Bill, Matana Roberts, Melvin Gibbs, Gabby Fluke-Mogul & Charlie Burnham, JB Lewis & Chad Taylor, Ka Baird and numerous others. Stay Tuned!

(L’Rain + June McDoom + Fusilier, Tues 3/28, 7p @ Union Pool 484 Union Ave. Williamsburg - FREE)   

THIS WEEK’s OTHER SHOWS: