Bklyn Sounds 5/9/2023 - 5/15/2023 + The Value(s) of a "Venue”

Where We Hear Live Music and What Are the Expectations? + Shows: DeForrest Brown Jr.'s "Bombingham" / Ben UFO / Lucretia Dalt / Liv.e + Standing on the Corner + Makaya McCraven + Laraaji / ...and more

Ever since lockdown ended and spaces where live music is performed began hosting it again — or new spaces began putting music on — I’ve been thinking a lot about venues. Their meaning, their value, their strong suits and drawbacks. At gigs over the past few weeks, experiencing growing disconnections between the intentions and pursuits of venues, between energy and expectation, between comfort and endeavor, my deliberation has only intensified. Not just hollow thoughts I hope. I’m trying to understand how Bklyn Sounds engages these places — why I have biases towards some, and not others, and what’s at the core of those biases. More importantly, I’m trying to understand why what the music seems to be doing at this moment in time, is not being matched by spaces allowing it full expression. And what, if anything, can be done about that disparity. 

Because for community-building to continue progressing around rhythm and improvisation, it’s imperative that the spaces in which we gather are inviting for all people in their listening-and-movement nightlife rituals. That those spaces are natural for musicians and the music they make, allow for risks, and not be subject to unreasonable constraints, but also offer real compensation. And that those spaces are capable of subsisting (maybe even thriving) in the arts-capital economy, including in a city such as New York, at once continually engineered as a playground of wealth while remaining a magnet for great young artists. Are all those things simultaneously possible?  

I’m not sure. But wandering around gigs large and small — by my count, I’ve seen 84 in 2023, in venues that stretch from Madison Square Garden to Crown Heights house shows — you get the sense of change taking place in the music, with audiences, and around possibility, a change that has little directly to do with the one-percenters, and the mostly stagnant creativity amidst the largess of mass-media and cultural platforms. But the desire to start getting thoughts down on-paper really came from seeing three improvised gigs last week — one in a rock club, one in a restaurant that irregularly hosts music, one in a neighborhood bar that does the same — which contrasted greatly with two I saw at traditional Manhattan jazz-club establishments in April. (All were previewed in past Bklyn Sounds columns.)

Each of last week’s gigs were for audiences that were half (if not quarter) the size of the capacity of the clubs, yet each was a full-house (between 30-70 folks), the rock club getting less full as ensuing acts came on. The audiences were at times rowdy and vociferous, but always attuned…especially when the music got quiet, or deeply weird. Which it did a lot. In this, they seemed well-informed, and inside the sound — they may have chatted and/or ate hipster Japanese food and/or stumbled over to the bar, but they were constantly aware that they were “at a gig.” The price to get-in was free with RSVP at the rock club (one of a series of shows presented with a financing partner), $10 at the restaurant, and “tip the band” at the bar (all three beer pitchers were stuffed with Jacksons by the end). The sound was generally great — maybe a bit too quiet at the restaurant, but that was also the music talking. 

And maybe most importantly, there was movement in the audience at each. All three nights hit pockets of groove — the trio at the bar rode theirs mercilessly — and the venues allowed for listeners and their bodies to act accordingly. Don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t always easy. Both the bar and the restaurant aren’t really designed for “audience,” much less “dancing,” and yet each situation created camaraderie, maybe bumping into one another amiably, apologetically acknowledging that interaction, and carrying on. Being “in it” meant being together. When sets ended, the applause was alertly on cue and boisterous.   

There were certainly cue’d applause at the jazz-clubs too. You may know the one I’m talking about: the polite clapping after a solo, heard after Each - And - Every - Solo. Yes, that’s a pet-peeve, though if those were the only scripted moments here, all would be forgiven. They weren’t. There was a strict protocol to the entire experience, from length of set and the just-loud-enough amplifications, to the required interactions with seating and wait-staff — both clubs had full-menus and per-person minimums on top of the steep cover charge. (Full disclosure: I was on the guest-list, but the minimums still applied and the cost was equivalent to half a year’s paid subscription to Dada Strain.) The all-seated audiences too were from central casting, heavily tourist, talking quietly throughout the music (paused for the polite clapping), mostly indulging in a consumer “jazz” experience that’s been a global industry standard since at least 52nd Street. 

The all-seated aspects of the club audiences did not escape the bandleader at one of these gigs, a British drummer whose band was essentially playing a set of improvised broken-beat grooves. But his encouragement for them to get up and dance was half-hearted. A seasoned pro, he knew what he was asking for was impossible. Another wink to the spirit of musical freedom, in a space developed to mostly curtail that spirit. 

So why go there? Well…the music! 

In both cases, it was astonishing (at times), and certainly performed all-too rarely in the United States of America. These establishment jazz-clubs were hosting foreign players whose primary opportunities to play in the U.S. come via well-funded institutions, whether private businesses like corporate clubs and festivals, civic-funded arts presenters, well-endowed universities with great arts programs, or deep-pocketed arts nonprofits. And in many cases, these opportunities are not simply issues of cost, but also, increasingly, of bookings, work-visas, and logistical capabilities. As participants in the global arts economy, these institutions have the infrastructure to not only bring in the talent, but also pay them a wage that the artists deserve. This is crucial for artists, and the importance of such an exchange can not be discounted by DIY/local-scene-first purists. Yet it also presents an impossibility for the local club, much less the DIY bar. And if what suffers is the energy presentation of the music, who gets to hear it, and the context in which listeners receive it, then that is the price to be paid.  

Yet what if — as the British drummer was hinting with his words, and sounds when he told us t9 get up — the new music increasingly getting produced in the improvisational continuum with roots in the Great Black Music still often referred to as “jazz,” no longer fits comfortably into the establishment’s consumer jazz-club experience? What if it's music with more machines on-stage than “acoustic” instruments? A music with less round-the-horn soloists to clap politely to and more noise - or no solos? A music whose intent is unequivocally to make the audience move? (Let’s for the sake of argument presume that this hasn’t always been the case…) What if the new originality in sound is outsripping the industry business models? What if the set of music-presentation and social-gathering values that a venue needs to consider in its programming is forced to step up, just as the music is stepping up, to assist in creating a new direction? 

I keep harping that the pandemicine must be a time for change for everyone — and that it can reinvent what a great venue can be. In many ways, this is among the central tenets on which Bklyn Sounds was born. At the moment, the energy in New York is such that, venue-wise, anything goes, and the closer to “anything” the better. And yes, creatively, it feels more like New York than it has in years. (After all, what is Trans-Pecos hosting a late-night anime-meets-gabber party immediately after an evening of avant-garde noise, but a generational update on what Joe’s Pub has long done?) To move forward at the pace that the musicians and activists are, the community (communities) need to keep all these things in mind. 

Maybe more soon…

FURTHER READING: Jim Allen, “Elevating the Underground: The ’70s NYC Loft Jazz Scene” (Bandcamp Daily 4/19/2023) // Giovanni Russonello, “Where Jazz Lives Now” (New York Times 3/17/2022) // Emma Warren, “Make Some Space For Us: Tuning Into Total Refreshment Centre” (Sweet Machine Publishing 2019)

THIS WEEK’s SHOWS: