Bklyn Sounds 9/6/2023 - 9/12/2023 + Bullish on NYC: A Fall Preview

"Come Care with Me" + Shows: Luna / Wendy Eisenberg's The Stone residency / Fay Victor / "Turntable on the Hudson" 25th anniversary / "Shinkoyo" 20th anniversary / "ClubHouse Jamboree" / Donis / +

September calls for new season arts previews like year-end holidays demand annual best-of lists. (Or maybe I’ve just been doing this too long.) So here’s the Bklyn Sounds version. Though don’t expect an inventory of releases and events, or corresponding dates and locations. Think of this more as a pep-talk — for me as much as for you — that where New York is culturally headed has the possibility to be as interesting as where we’ve already been. In fact, that some of that future has already arrived — minus the commercialization (or with minimal commercialization) and media hosannas. This ain’t grandstanding, just a personal accentuation, a clarifying focus on the local details, an escape from the weight of inevitable grand narratives.  

While I’ve always loved arts previews because of the way they look forward to the incoming, my favorite aspect has been less the discovery of particulars about upcoming blockbusters about to be dropped onto culture — because it’s always the big thing getting the space or time: the lauded or expensive film or show, the superstar album/tour — than the general possibility of “the next.” The smaller prospects and the unexpected vistas they create. Some of it may be a permanent residue of “first day of school” syndrome, choosing to focus on being back in a social environment and the atmosphere it manifests, rather than the damn syllabus. And some of it may be old-fashioned critical contrarianism (also school-born, in my case) of choosing not to listen, watch, attend or like what I’m told to. Chances are, if you read Dada Strain, that strand’s part of your DNA as well.

But don’t mistake being contrary for being negative.

Incoming seasons are in the business of offering new colors, a change in perspective, and that, more than any specific iteration or view, is the phenomena worth celebrating. Like a pagan festival. What Bklyn Sounds wants to do is create a particular, well-researched, intentional road — this one is marked: Rhythm + Improvisation + Community — to the new colors you know are just around the corner. How do you know? Because regardless where you reside, local culture doesn’t simply stop evolving. (For good, but also for bad — that’s not new either.) And if you care to go looking for it, we can do it together. That’s the pep-talk: Come Care with Me. (Actually it sounds more like a marketing pitch…hmmm.)    

Which is why I keep saying that there’s really been no better time to find those new colors all over New York’s neighborhoods. A couple of weeks back, I was talking to a DJ, born/bred in NYC, old enough to know better, a student of the city’s nightlife, and quite successful at this moment. We were discussing the “club scene” now, and he voiced something that I had been contemplating for a while. “I think it’s better than ever.” He said this not as a person who was gonna draw up a fantasy battle putting Larry Levan’s Garage versus the heyday of Sound Factory, versus Bushwick, versus blah-blah-blah. He was saying: the culture is everywhere, it is breathing with deep full lungs, and it has more participants in more places doing more different kinds of work than we’ve had in recent memory. And I can not disagree. Of course, it’s New York, there’s still more bullshit-upon-bullshit piled on top of those trying to imagine the next; but also, the possibilities are endless.

Writing Bklyn Sounds week after week, I can’t work in all the intresting music series being started at the moment, all the DJ/musician residencies that are quietly bringing great music into corner bars and new venues (which are again opening up — both the cheesy corporates and the DIYs), all the house parties and lock-ins I am asked not to feature here (but can always be found on IG Stories, if there’s a flier). I don’t know even a small percentage of what’s going on uptown — but am always looking and would love to find out. And knowing only a splinter of what I don’t know, I can tell you, IT’S A LOT. More than any MSM preview or weekly newsletter can fit onto its pages and screens. 

To use the term that the moneyed classes of this town have memorialized with multiple statues around the financial district, I am as bullish about NYC musicking culture as I have been in a long long time. Then again, I am also bullish about the local rhythm, improvisation and community culture-building going on all over the planet, because the city doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The world may be on fire, but the people’s creative abilities to find ways of explaining, describing and coping with that fire, are not receding.  </pep-talk> Let the season commence.

This Week’s Shows: