About the Book
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.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction. Locating the Williamsburg Avant-Garde 1
Part I. Utopian Spaces for Sound
1. The Emergence of the Williamsburg Scene: Warehouses, Squatter Parties, and Punk Roots, 1988–1994 21
2. Pirate Radio and Jumping the River: The Williamsburg Loft Scene, 1997–2004 55
3. Art Galleries, Clubs, and Bohemian CafÉs: The Williamsburg DIY, 2001–2006 100
Part II. Commercial DIY and the Last Underground Venues
4. A Point of Confluence: The Downtown Scene Comes to Zebulon, 2004–2006 145
5. A New Generation Emerges: Zebulon, 2005–2012 189
6. A Fractured Landscape: The Last Avant-Garde Music Spaces of Williamsburg, 2005–2014 228
Afterword. Art, Experiment, and Capital 263
Notes 271
Art Sources for the Williamsburg Avant-Garde 335
Bibliography 343
Index 367
About the Author :
Cisco Bradley is Associate Professor of History at the Pratt Institute and author of Universal Tonality: The Life and Music of William Parker, also published by Duke University Press.
Review :
"The Williamsburg Avant-Garde is the most comprehensive study to date of one of the most important music scenes of the past 30-plus years." - Dave Mandl (The Wire) "Well-researched. . . . Drawing on these first-hand accounts as well as on his access to the personal archives of some of the artists involved, Bradley provides a lively account of the neighborhood’s vital experimental music movement from its underground beginnings in various squats and abandoned industrial sites to its eventual dissolution in the face of rising rents and gentrification." - Daniel Barbiero (Point of Departure) "One of the most important strengths of The Williamsburg Avant-Garde is that it elaborates with equal care, regardless of idiom or generation, on the intentions, ideas and aesthetic strategies of the highly diverse range of artists who could find a platform there. . . . What makes Bradley’s archeology at the same time so urgently contemporary is that so many of the artists covered are alive and active right now, even if a good number of them may still be underground." - Patrick Brennan (Arteidolia) "Bradley’s vivid portraits of the dynamic interactions between musicians, curators, and other participants behind the Williamsburg avant-garde scene are made possible by way of his extensive interviews with scene participants that provide the bulk of the data in his book. These interviewees illuminate important information that would be difficult to find in any written record." - David Pearson (Notes) "The Williamsburg Avant-Garde is a comprehensive and exhaustive output of Bradley’s research. . . . [A]n extremely valuable contribution to the fields of both music studies and New York City history. - Theodore Gordon (Journal of the American Musicological Society) "The Williamsburg Avant-Garde is a must read not only for avant-garde music aficionados, but for anybody interested in understanding how and why creativity bursts in some places at certain times." - Sebastien Doubinsky (Seismograf) "A densely layered, kaleidoscopic musicological treatise, The Williamsburg Avant-Garde 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. . . . 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. . . ." - Brendan Riley (Los Angeles Review of Books) "The Williamsburg Avant-Garde will captivate readers with a pre-existing predilection for outside-the-box music. Bradley’s prose is engaging, and the grainy black-and-white photographs complement his storytelling. He writes with academic rigor based on forensic research, but his lively style channels the energy from the people and places at the heart of Williamsburg’s scene. Rezoning laws may have kicked this lively, artistic community down the road into Bushwick, Ridgewood and beyond, but Bradley’s book makes a valuable contribution to keeping its memory alive." - Matty Bannond (New York City Jazz Record)
