When Art Evolves, We Evolve

Brendan Riley reviews Cisco Bradley’s “The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront.”

By Brendan RileySeptember 7, 2024

• Music

• Cultural Studies

• History

CISCO BRADLEY’S The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront (2023) chronicles a vital and now-vanished facet of American musical and cultural history in New York City from the mid-1980s to 2015. The book investigates how, amid hypercommercialism and mutating audio technologies, bold musicians, expert and amateur alike, impelled by a big-hearted DIY ethos, made new, imaginative music as public, independent, and free as possible by exploiting urban niches and cultural interstices, using dive bars, loft spaces, garages, warehouses, restaurants, and cafés as musical laboratories for experiments in sound, installation, and performance.

A densely layered, kaleidoscopic musicological treatise, Williamsburg draws on hundreds of interviews, articles, essays, and recordings to describe the historical impact of a daunting array of musicians, ensembles, musical genres, stylistic innovations, and movements, and the Northern Brooklyn locales that fostered them. It was a singular era propelled by a relentless quest for the new and different—and by musicians’ struggles to survive the vicissitudes of the marketplace.

Bradley’s highly detailed chronicle, with its abundance of black-and-white photos and other archival material, reveals the direct, scrappy, creative energy of the time. It celebrates a watershed generation of alternative currents to mainstream entertainment, in the form of purposeful “irritainment,” and it reads as a powerful manifesto for the shared artistic visions and cross-cultural pollinations of artists driven by a fearless anti-commercial desire to tinker and explore—from John Zorn’s sublime musical ministrations to Mike Pride’s fraught, edgy, kinetic sound jags.

Part one, “Utopian Spaces for Sound,” which spans the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s, covers the origins of the Williamsburg scene, including its punk roots, its development of loft and warehouse spaces for events, its squatter parties, its pirate radio, and its art galleries, clubs, and bohemian cafés, all resulting from an artistic exodus from Manhattan to the temporarily more accessible and affordable spaces of postindustrial north Brooklyn. Part two, “Commercial DIY and the Last Underground Venues,” focuses largely on the vital phenomenon of Zebulon, the most important Williamsburg club of the era, one that became a revered high temple of outré music.

Many musicians in the Williamsburg avant-garde shared a common goal: discovering how to regulate or control the action of improvised music. Tracing scenes that move from free-form loft and warehouse gatherings into more established neighborhood clubs of varying lifespans, Bradley pinpoints the creative sparks among musicians who connected through a shared embrace of openness and a willingness to forge new, often unimagined, musical approaches. Many of these artists were refugees from academic musical thinking, pursuing “high-intensity free jazz” for its own sake, for the “power of the action.”

Bradley delves into the work of Butch Morris, creator of improvisational conduction, “a virtuoso of nonverbal expression,” and his “Black February,” a 2005 series of “forty-four concerts and four workshops at nine different venues, involving eighty-five musicians.” Another Morris project, Orchestra SLANG, in collaboration with Kenny Wolleson and Jonathon Haffner, held several residencies at Zebulon, with flyers proclaiming, “Challenge Your Perception.” Rooted in the Black Arts Movement, Onaje Will Halsey (a.k.a. Menshemsaqa Angaza) was inspired by Robert Hayden’s historical poem “Runagate Runagate” (1962), about the Underground Railroad, and “by how Duke Ellington and Max Roach each said that they wanted to make music that was beyond category. […] We tried to be open to inspiration from everywhere […] and ge[t] to that place where vibrations are just right […] like an endless movement.” The musical oeuvre Coin Coin by the Matana Roberts Quartet also included storytelling and ephemera, using signal years from African American history as intervallic cues vis-à-vis Butch Morris’s conduction. Inspired by Charles Mingus, the band Eye Contact pursued free jazz, complete improvisation, “free flamenco,” and “primal pulse.” Their song “Eye Contact with God” is described as “a spiritual imperative” that “travels the line between life and death,” evoking “a primordial trance state, exploring the edge where the ego gives way to something bigger.”

The section “Music for the Streets” covers the Kenny Wollesen Big Band, including their February 2003 participation in a protest against the Iraq War, inspired by Wollesen’s involvement with the political street theater of the Boston-based Puppeteer Cooperative. In the super-inclusive Wollesen Street Unit, all sounds were welcome, and the group never featured the same lineup twice. We learn that the performances were “an all-encompassing sensory experience.” At times, “the revelry compelled the band to march out onto Wythe Avenue,” outside Zebulon, a spontaneous exuberance still “possible in 2005 and 2006 before luxury condos were built in the neighborhood that drew a new demographic to the area that insisted—via calls to the police—that silence prevail.” Williamsburg also covers collaborations between Wollesen and John Zorn, their athletic renditions of original compositions built on ethnic and world music, klezmer, and other strains of melodically rich music: “The solos were not decided in advance, so Wollesen would choose someone on the spot and give them full control over what they played or performed.” This ethos meant that no one person had to be in charge.

Williamsburg touches on and digs deep into hundreds of different bands, its pages littered with a delightful spectrum of colorful group names; some memorable standouts include Arab on Radar, Cellular Chaos, Guerilla Toss, Stay Fucked, Tiger Hatchery, Upsilon Acrux, Whore Paint, Xaddax, and Zevious. The ensemble I Don’t Hear Nothin’ but the Blues sought to develop, “on the fly, a resource bank of motivic ideas and rhythms” in which “nothing was preconceived.” Many other groups surveyed herein channeled this anti-aesthetic. Orthrelm’s music was “densely packed with musical information” with “little or no structural repetition” but “a fractal-like inner logic.” Mostly Other People Do the Killing practiced, “often with a touch of humor,” its own style of “cued orchestration,” based on sudden decisions rather than predetermined clues, which allowed “the form, the pieces, and the trajectory of the music to take shape in real time through interaction among the band members themselves,” exploring “wild tangents” through a “collage of multiple pieces” and playing different pieces simultaneously, “depending on the mood in the moment.” One especially representative section of Williamsburg highlights the band Transit:

Employing “graphic scores, harmonic predeterminations, and conceptual systems of rules and signs,” Transit created sophisticated interchanges among musicians that would then build and recede in intensity. The sounds themselves were deeply rooted in the Brooklyn of that time, featuring odes to trains, canals, neighborhoods, and the distinct cultures and peculiarities that inhabited those spaces. […] The sounds they produced captured the changing Brooklyn, caught in its postindustrial, not-yet-gentrified moment.

In addition to a chapter devoted to the cornucopia of original music performed at the club Zebulon, Bradley’s Williamsburg odyssey visits scores of lesser and greater venues, most now defunct. As with the bands, the venues themselves offer a splendid conjuring of names: Asterix, Otto’s Shrunken Head, Secret Project Robot, St. Vitus, Tonic, Silent Barn, Freedom Garden, Goodbye Blue Monday. One especially important and beloved locale, Death by Audio, “the last great venue of Williamsburg,” was “a subversive oasis in a neighborhood that was rapidly gentrifying and pushing artists out,” while “zones of silence [enforced by residential developments] metastasized.” In his afterword, “Art, Experiment, and Capital,” Bradley highlights the antagonism between American capital’s truculent need to subsume cultural production in pursuit of profit and the avant-garde’s vigorous, eclectic cultural mission that aims for new and undreamed utopias.

If any work of musicology ever deserved an accompanying soundtrack, it is surely Williamsburg, which enumerates a vast, historic outpouring of creative compositions and performances. Interested, resourceful readers can discover the rich, diverse, often audacious work of many of these musicians through a wide variety of media, including audience bootlegs, concert videos of superb quality, and high-fidelity studio recordings.

Bradley has been described by the Pratt Institute as “a scholar of social, cultural, and intellectual history set in diasporan contexts.” The diaspora documented in Williamsburg—a sad, and by now familiar, tale in New York and many US cities—is the flight of musicians and artists from wholesale property rezoning, acquisition, redevelopment, and stratospheric rents, their forcible scattering in search of more livable and accommodating environs to practice their craft.

Beyond its compelling factual manifesto, Williamsburg delineates the stubborn, complicated American dilemma over the nature and quality of urban neighborhoods. Where and how can artists perform? Under what aegis or whose auspices? How can they maintain a livelihood if they are also devoted to pushing the boundaries of aesthetics, taste, and tolerance? What is the value and purpose of the independent, noncommercial artist in an economy ruthlessly devoted to wholesale commodification? What is the dynamic imperative between the artist and the local community, both as it relates to and is distinct from the generally accepted organs of taste, production, access, and distribution?

Given its documentary intricacies and intimacies, Williamsburg stands as a rebuke to the way corporate control of real estate and artistic commerce incentivizes the production of “art” for profit alone, and as a reminder of what is possible through vigorous, aesthetically adventurous urban cooperation for art’s sake. As Bradley quotes saxophonist Henry Threadgill, “When art evolves, we evolve. It’s a pursuit of truth.” The Williamsburg Avant-Garde vividly pursues the truth about the unique vitality of this time and place.

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Photos of Williamsburg waterfront courtesy of Ellie Eberlee.