The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront

by Cisco Bradley

In The Williamsburg Avant-Garde Cisco Bradley chronicles the rise and fall of the underground music and art scene in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn between the late 1980s and the early 2010s. Drawing on interviews, archival collections, musical recordings, videos, photos, and other ephemera, Bradley explores the scene’s social, cultural, and economic dynamics. Building on the neighborhood’s punk DIY approach and aesthetic, Williamsburg's free jazz, postpunk, and noise musicians and groups---from Mary Halvorson, Zs, and Nate Wooley to Matana Roberts, Peter Evans, and Darius Jones---produced shows in a variety of unlicensed venues as well as in clubs and cafes. At the same time, pirate radio station free103point9 and music festivals made Williamsburg an epicenter of New York’s experimental culture. In 2005, New York’s rezoning act devastated the community as gentrification displaced its participants farther afield in Brooklyn and in Queens. With this portrait of Williamsburg, Bradley not only documents some of the most vital music of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries; he helps readers better understand the formation, vibrancy, and life span of experimental music and art scenes everywhere.

Genres: Music

408 pages, Paperback

Published March 21, 2023

Reviews

[Jason Cady · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is great that Cisco Bradley documented this music. This book has everything that can be good about academic writing: attention to detail and accuracy; and nothing that I find bad about some academic writing: unnecessary jargon and losing focus by trying to contextualize everything by quoting thinkers like Derrida or Lacan.

Disclaimer: I am mentioned and quoted a few times in this book, and I personally know many, if not most, of the artists featured.

As much as I enjoyed this book I do have a few criticisms. First of all, part of the author's thesis is that this scene happened in Williamsburg because that neighborhood was affordable. I agree that rent and economics were an essential part of the story, but by the time I moved to NYC in 2001 Williamsburg was no longer affordable. Except for about five months of sleeping on a couch in the living room of a loft in Williamsburg I lived in Bed-Stuy. Almost none of the artists I knew that are included in this book lived in Williamsburg. It was too expensive even for people from wealthy families.

Second, the author details certain venues that were located in Williamsburg. However the artists that played at those venues also played in Manhattan and venues throughout Brooklyn and elsewhere. I was happy to perform at The Right Bank, but I was way more excited when I got gigs at Tonic. And a little later I much preferred getting booked at The Stone than at Zebulon. I remember one time that I played at Zebulon the co-owner complained that we were using music stands and said that customers wouldn't buy beer if we had music stands.

There was definitely a scene—or at least several overlapping scenes—I just don't think it was centered in Williamsburg. If one had to pinpoint a geographic center I suppose I agree with Bradley that North Brooklyn was probably it, but I just don't think that anyone identified as a Williamsburg artist. To some extent, the scenes were more about where the artist was from: Welseyan, Oberlin, or elsewhere. But really it was more about people finding common ground by shared affinities in their musical interests.

And finally, the music Bradley features was mostly Free-Jazz and underground Rock. But, I think the scene also came out of the "classical" avant-garde. Many of the artists in this book drew inspiration from the lineage of Cage, Stockhausen, La Monte Young, et al; as they did from either Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, et al; or The Velvet Underground, Sonic Youth, et al.

If you are interested in this music, or even if you are just interested in well-written books on recent music history, you should definitely read this book.

[Noah Steele · Rating 3 out of 5]

"The Williamsburg Avant-Garde" is Historian Cisco Bradly's second book, expanding upon much of his research on free jazz and experimental music from his first publication on William Parker. This book densely outlines the avant-garde, free jazz, post-punk, and noise scenes that emerged around the turn of the century in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. Bradly impressive research utilizes hundreds of interviews, going into great detail on the individual venues, bands, and individuals that were at the heart of the scene. This book could serve as a "how to" guide to cultivate an avant-garde art scene, outlining the specific socioeconomic circumstances that allowed for this scene to grow out of the east village and pushed it further north into Bushwick in the 2010s.

I came to this book from a love for the music, but found myself most interested in the economic circumstances that surrounded the scene itself. This book is an incredible resource and a great read but is so impressively dense that I would not recommend it to anyone who doesn't have an intensely strong interest in free-jazz, post-punk, noise, and other genres of the sorts.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Since I attended the Bang on a Can Collective’s Long Play festival in Brooklyn the last two years, and have watched plenty of live streaming music from Roulette Intermedium since the pandemic, I thought that this book worth checking out. And it is.

I know a little about the avant-garde scene in Manhattan (the jazz lofts of the 1970s and 80s, clubs like The Knitting Factory, The Stone, and Tonic, musicians like John Zorn, record labels like Tzadik, and record stores like Other Music and Downtown Music Gallery) and the gentrification that undercut it. I didn’t know much about Williamsburg, other than it is the base for the Burnt Sugar Arkestra.

Bradley details here the economic and cultural conditions, the musicians, and the spaces, legal and illegal, where cutting edge creative music bloomed in Williamsburg from the 1990s to the 2010s. He also details the economic forces–real estate, gentrification–that killed the creative scene.

The book has two threads.
Primarily in the introductory and concluding chapters, Bradley delineates the meta-level socioeconomic and historical forces that made the music scene in Williamsburg possible, and then impossible. Basically, he describes a cycle of boom and bust, or bust and boom. Williamsburg was de-industrialized after WWII, resulting in an industrial wasteland (abandoned building) and an impoverished population of those who did not have the economic means to seek opportunity elsewhere. Into the decimated, devalued space, artists, who needed space and had little money, moved beginning in the 1980s. Once there, they remade the spaces they occupied–living, working, practice, studio, and performance spaces–into loci of creativity, producing artistic value where there had once been industrial economic value. These artists become a magnet for other artists, who move to Williamsburg, creating a scene and a fertile ground for creativity, which attracted more artists, and the cycle repeats, reproducing itself. In essence, the artists are pioneers, creating value out of a place that seems to be without value. At some point in the cycle, the aesthetic value created begins to become economic value, or at least is sniffed out as economic value, and the real estate monster named Gentrification awakens. I suppose that it could be said that artists creatively transform property, while the gentrifiers follow afterwards to formulaically transform property for the monoculture of profit. What Bradley does reminds me of Theodor Adorno’s analysis of modern music in "The Sociology of Music" and other texts, where he shows that creative music is inevitably hunted down and transformed into a predictable commodity (for example, big band jazz charts) for the profit of the music industrial complex.
The middle of the book is a detailed rendering of the creative artists, music, and performance spaces that produced the avant-garde experimental scene. The first folks were local punk, post-punk, industrial musicians: very DIY. I was familiar with hardly any of these artists, but using Spotify and Bandcamp was able to listen to some. Of those, my favorite is the No Neck Blues Band. It was the subsequent waves of avant garde jazzers, like Mary Halvorson or Nate Wooley, with whom I am much more familiar. I was happy to read about the origins of these musicians, many of whom are now well-established and successful. The years in Williamsburg gave them the freedom to explore, experiment, and enter the creative paths that have allowed them to become, and continue to become, the creative artists that they were, are, and will be. Of all the musicians that Bradley talks about, his most effective discussion was of Connie Crothers, who was of an older generation, had studied with Lennie Tristano and been inspired by Cecil Taylor. She moved into a loft in Williamsburg, turning it into a performance and educational space, creating a cooperative synergy that developed talent and produced amazing music. This kind of cooperative synergy happened throughout Williamsburg, like at the club Zebulon, which became the seedbed for much creative work. But once rents skyrocketed, and artists were evicted from their living, working, and performance spaces, the circumstances that produced so much great music and art ceased to exist and were replaced by dull profit making.
The book is valuable for all the knowledge it recovers and disseminates, its socioeconomic and cultural framing, its detailed discussions of creativity and creative processes, and its hard-nosed nostalgia. Lesson: Creative spaces are rare, and creativity must always move on to find another devalued space on the margins of capitalism to reroot and thrive.