by Cisco Bradley (Music 781.65 Bra)
As the largest city in the United
States, and an historic port city often referred to as “the melting pot,” it
probably comes as no surprise that the astonishing diversity found in New York
City often leads to new forms of musical creativity. The music there evolves
over generations: in the Polley Music Library, you’ll find lots of books that
document scenes that were born or blossomed there, from many forms of jazz to
hip hop to disco to various forms of indie rock and beyond. Many important
classical composers have called the city home, and its many world class
ensembles have debuted many of their works. And then of course there is
Broadway, a whole subject unto itself with a massive influence on musical
trends.
Scenes that start as underground or
experimental music in New York City often become essential influences on
mainstream music in subsequent years. The new book The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and the Sound
on the Brooklyn Waterfront, addresses some of the most recent
underground music scenes to come out of the city, and you can borrow it from
the Polley Music Library.
As music history-related books go,
this one cuts about as close to the present-day as one can get, ranging from
the late 1980s until 2014, with the heaviest focus on the Oughts. Documenting
histories this recent has a particular advantage that’s nearly impossible for
many other historians: the author can not only discuss the activities of the
time with participants, but might have been able to participate personally! In
this case, author Bradley notes in his thorough introduction how his many
interviews for his website Jazz Right Now, as well as throwing his own DIY
shows starting in 2014, made this book almost a natural extension of his own
activities. Indeed, having devoured this book several times over myself, he is
the perfect person to document this scene.
I should mention that the
particular music covered in The Williamsburg Avant-Garde has had profound
effects on my own life as a listener and musician. These are the musicians I
count as “my generation,” whose work I followed as closely as possible from
afar through the many recordings issued by participants documented in this
book. When I was actively playing in bands, I helped book shows in Nebraska for
some of the artists mentioned in this book–in some cases house shows at my own
home, in the midwest’s equivalent of the kind of DIY performances discussed in
the book–and I consider many of them long-distance friends. With that
background, I feel like a have a strong understanding of what was happening
musically within this Williamsburg scene, but this book goes much deeper than
the music itself. As Bradley notes, “This book is a social and cultural history
of the Williamsburg avant-garde,” and for those of us immersed in this music
from afar, much of this history remained unknown unless one actually lived in
the city or somewhere nearby on the East coast. I learned a tremendous amount
that I didn’t know about music that I already love from this book.
For example, I didn’t realize that
Williamsburg had its own pirate radio station. Just like such stations helped
to promote new music in the drum & bass scene in the UK, New York’s
Free103point9 contributed to the Williamsburg scene starting in the late 90s.
For some reason I had just thought they were a record label, and indeed, its
founders branched out to becoming a nonprofit that could serve the community in
many ways, which continues today as Wavefarm.
Broadly speaking, the book tracks
New York City’s perpetual struggles between artists and real estate developers,
a story that has perpetually chased creative communities from borough to
borough over decades. As artists took over vacant warehouses to put on creative
multimedia events, they generally managed to remain friendly with neighbors and
stay under the radar of police for some time, but eventually that unending
hunger for new development always seems to catch up. The narrative of the book
will take you from neighborhood to neighborhood (and introduce you to lots of
venues that sound like they were wonderful), but to get a visual sense of what
happened over time, I really appreciated the three maps included just before
the book’s introduction. I found myself flipping back to these several times as
I was reading, to get a sense of changes over time.
Sometimes things just move a few blocks, but in New York, that can take you
into entirely different circumstances.
For those who might not be as
familiar with the riveting music produced by this scene, Bradley has structured
the book to move smoothly between tales of particular venues and biographies of
the bands best known for playing them. The diversity of musical approaches
represented in the book is quite impressive, though a particular commonality
among the Williamsburg scene tended to be immersion in various forms of
improvisation. The cover of the book, for example, features a live photo of the
band Little Women, fronted by Travis LaPlante, who has gone on to some renown
as the leader of the saxophone quartet Battle Trance, and Darius Jones, a
phenomenal bandleader, soloist and interpreter in his own right. While the band
never became a household name, they are a great example of the new kinds of
cross-genre impulses that were typical of the scene, featuring the compositional
rigor of classical music, the power and improvisation of jazz, and the
explosive power of punk music. Lots of other genre-transcendent bands are
discussed, some whose work felt very serious like Zs, and others who had fun
with their approaches, like Dynamite Club or People. I was also pleased to see
drummer and composer Mike Pride appear throughout the book, perhaps more than
any other musician, as he has participated in such a wide range of fantastic
music over the last 20 years without getting as much credit as he deserves. Reading about the formations of so many bands
from this scene, and seeing how they sometimes fold into other acts with time,
is a pure joy, as the book documents the formative years for many musicians who
have gone on to enjoy long careers that started within this community. If
you’re interested in learning more about the music produced by this scene over
25 years, Bradley includes a fantastic list of recordings in the “Art Sources”
section at the end of the book. While some of the recordings listed here are
influences on the artists of the Williamsburg scene, many of the scene’s best
recordings are mentioned as well–just look for albums released in the window
between roughly 1988 and 2014 to get a head start on those.
In the end, there’s a lot to learn
from books like The Williamsburg Avant-Garde even for musicians
who aren’t from this scene: the many stories captured in this book resonate
with the same kinds of struggles that bands and artists all over our country
still experience every day. As important and essential as this music was (and
is), perhaps the most important takeaway from this book is learning more about
what it means to be an active part of a creative community, no matter how
temporary, and how that work can be transformative for everyone involved, one
neighborhood at a time.
(If you enjoy this, you may also
wish to try New York Noise: Radical Jewish Music and the Downtown Scene
by Tamar Barzel, Arcana X: Musicians on Music by John Zorn (ed.), or Universal Tonality: The Life and Music of William Parker by
Cisco Bradley.)
( official Cisco Bradley
web site )
Recommended
by Scott S.
Polley Music Library
Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?
New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!
Check out this, and all the other great music resources, at the Polley Music Library, located on the 2nd floor of the Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th & "N" St. in downtown Lincoln. You'll find biographies of musicians, books about music history, instructional books, sheet music, CDs, music-related magazines, and much more. Also check out Polley Music Library Picks, the Polley Music Library's e-mail newsletter, and follow them on Facebook!
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