Improvising Myth and Memory Downtown: Music Venues, Race, and the Potential of Place

Abstract

In 2005, composer John Zorn founded a music venue dedicated to ‘the experimental and avant-garde’ on New York’s Lower East Side, an area known for underground arts but long undergoing reinvestment. Music criticism and the social sciences have considered venues that cater to cutting-edge music, but they do not reflect recent studies that challenge a historiographic rift racialising these so-called jazz and non-jazz vanguards. Studies of art in urban areas, meanwhile, have shown how sites disrupt minority communities, but they largely assume race as a stable idea. This article bridges this gap by considering how New York’s avant-garde-experimental juncture mediates such accepted racialisations. My ethnography shows how artists and sites mythologise defunct venues as ‘central’ and ‘inclusive’ havens and craft an indeterminate racial positioning. I argue that by unsettling putative racialisations—through myth and memory—place making downtown makes space for navigating subjectivities that range from comfort with, to ambivalence about musical and historiographic blackness. I propose the potential of place to interpret how music sites dialogue with race. While definitively acknowledging limits of racial tropes, this approach also employs them strategically to locate meaning about the nature of interracial sociality.

KEYWORDS:

• jazz
• experimental music
• downtown scene
• music venues
• space

Acknowledgements

1 thank Ofer Gazit for engaging in critical dialogue with me throughout the writing of this article and Sarah-Jane Ripa and Michael C. Heller for careful readings of the manuscript. I acknowledge Taylor Ho Bynum, Sylvie Courvoisier, Okkyung Lee, Ikue Mori, Ras Moshe, Todd Neufeld, Tyshawn Sorey, and John Zorn for generously granting interviews and correspondence as well as the many other musicians who spoke with me informally about this topic. Finally, I am grateful to the anonymous readers who provided feedback that has aided my analysis.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This article is based on ethnographic research from 2009–2011 and on follow-up correspondence through 2015. Since my research, however, The Stone at 15 Ave. C closed permanently. It opened a new location at 55 West 13th Street at The New School. Because my analysis of The Stone (2005–2018) is expressly dependent on location, it pertains only to 15 Ave. C. I have largely adopted the ethnographic present here as ‘a necessary construction of time’ (Hastrup 1990) that highlights how myriad references to the past are brought to bear on the analysis.

2 Operated by New York City Housing Authority, they extend from Avenue D and Houston Street north to Thirteenth Street.

3 To some extent, this may have been a proliferation of the myth of a ‘postracial’ America (see, for example, Kaplan 2011; Ledwidge, Verney, and Parmar 2013; Teasley and Ikard 2010; Tesler and Sears 2010). I’m sure, too, that my questions and questioning were circumscribed by my whiteness. At the same time, my ongoing dialogue about race and encounters both on the downtown scene and in daily life with my life partner Tyshawn Sorey as well as George Lewis’s indelible critique of the scene (2004b, 89–91; 2004a, 163–167) have incomparably influenced my commitment to better understanding how it is central to downtown.

4 Steven Feld’s observations about the link between identity, place, and place names and the referential potential of place have also influenced my consideration of place making downtown (1996, 111; 112–113; 1987).

5 Admittedly, my definition is similar to Barzel’s. One of the primary ‘crisscrossing … networks’ to which she implicitly refers, I submit, is the Vision Festival scene (2015, 21).

6 For a study of lineage that examines the musical forbearers of jazz singer Sathima Bea Benjamin, see (Muller and Benjamin 2011, 95–123).

7 It is also likely a response to the looming closing of CBGBs, which shut down for good in 2006.

8 The collaboration was doubtless achieved through musical competence as well (for a study of interaction and competence, see Brinner 1995).

9 Bynum refers to the 74 Leonard Street, Manhattan location of the Knitting Factory.

10 When it opened in the late 1990s, the actual value of the property was $72,000. A decade later, its market value had increased to $577,000, with a projected actual value of $463,500 and projected market value of $1,030,000 for the subsequent year. Operational costs reflected these pecuniary changes. Caruso maintained that while the rent for 107 Norfolk Street had doubled since opening in 1998, its business had not.

11 In her ethnography of downtown ‘Jewish-ly-identified’ artists, Tamar Barzel made a related point in contending that the limiting racialized histories of American music, which did not allow space for ‘white otherness’ (2004, 81), motivated the Radical Jewish Culture movement itself.

12 The Lower East Side place name is also strongly associated with the area’s Jewish past (see Barzel 2015, 59–62; Diner 2000).

13 At the Five Spot (located at 5 Cooper Square at the time, ‘Nightclubs and Other Venues’ n.d., The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, 2nd Ed.. Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. [Oxford University Press], accessed 18 September 2015, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/J330000pg38), Cecil Taylor, Thelonious Monk, and Ornette Coleman each had extended engagements in 1956, 1957, and 1959, respectively (Kelley 2009, 225–239; Litweiler 1992, 70–84; Spellman 1966, 9–11; 67–68). Beginning in 1962, Sun Ra’s Arkestra held a residency at Slug’s Saloon (Szwed 1998, 218–228). For a history of the jazz lofts, see Michael C. Heller (2016).

14 Unless otherwise noted, quotations in this section are taken from (‘The Stone Website’ n.d.).

15 Of the roughly thirty times that The Stone has listed benefit concerts as rent parties, about half the time it has done so in proximity to prose highlighting its location in the East Village.

16 If Byrd references the American involvement in the war, then the heyday of rent parties may be dated loosely from 1917–1933.

17 At the time, The New York Amsterdam News was located at 2293 Seventh Avenue, between W 134th and W 135th Streets, in Harlem (‘About’ 2011).

18 Genre-wise, The Stone also presents itself as a ‘performance space dedicated to the EXPERIMENTAL and AVANT-GARDE’. While undoubtedly Ellington may be heard and read as such, both the jazz avant-garde and experimental music are more commonly dated as emerging several decades later (on the jazz avant-garde and experimental music, see Baraka 1967; Cage 1961; Jost 1994; Litweiler 1990; Nyman 1999; Piekut 2011; Wilmer 1981).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amanda Scherbenske

Amanda Scherbenske PhD, writes about intercultural politics, race, and urban geography in the United States, focusing on jazz and experimental music. She teaches courses on jazz and popular music at the University of Pennsylvania.