archive
By Laura Brown
On a casual evening stroll it’s unlikely you’d simply chance upon The Firehouse Space on Frost Street, but if you did, you’d surely be intrigued enough to enter. The Firehouse Space is compelling not just because it’s a beautifully renovated former firehouse from bygone days but most primarily because of the dynamic performances you’ll find there. It’s a place to experience the innovative and the inspirational.
St. Vincent on stage at Crossing Brooklyn Ferry festival. Photo by Rebecca Greenfield
“And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.” Crossing Brooklyn Ferry – Walt Whitman
If there ever will be a distinct Brooklyn sound, it just played last weekend in one big blast.
Shelley Hirsch and Simon Ho.
Where were you then? Greenpoint vocalist Shelley Hirsch and Swiss keyboardist composer/arranger Simon Ho’s new CD is an evocative, nostalgic, and stylistic exploration of personal and cultural memory.
Hirsch was born in East New York, Brooklyn, and has been a seminal and influential presence in the new music and performance art scenes. Throughout her rich career Hirsch has been able to continually broaden and deepen her work musically and emotionally while still making every song sound like a revelation.
The sidewalk outside the entrance to Co-Op 87,covered with crates and boxes of $1 records, feels like your old college buddy’s apartment: stockpiles of stuff that live where it lands. But inside there’s a sense of cozy calm, like a warm library. That is, if libraries played loud post-punk albums.
This new Guernsey Street record store is small but not sparse. Record bins flank visitors on all sides and new releases paired with rare lps line the walls. The back wall, painted like a chalkboard, features handwritten new release titles between two caricatured record store patrons. It’s all very, very endearing.
As we all recover from the CMJ Festival, which brings together bands from all over the world, I started thinking about bands like the recently retired R.E.M. and Pearl Jam, and I recalled the days when record companies had relevance and would look to regional acts to nurture and grow into stars—when A&R (Artists & Repertoire) people not only mattered, but also cared. Athens, Georgia, gave us R.E.M. and The B-52s, and Seattle gave us Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, just to name a few. And all of those bands had a distinct sound and sensibility that was a symbiosis of music and art with the intrinsic values of their region. Isn’t R.E.M. the perfect sonic accompaniment to Faulkner? Can’t you feel the weather in the sounds of Alice in Chains? Clearly the natural and cultural surroundings and history influence artists, specifically musicians, right?
So I started thinking about Brooklyn—specifically North Brooklyn—and how this place impacts today’s musical output. I wondered if it did, and if it did, how? Did the musicians playing at Glasslands, Death by Audio, or Pete’s Candy Store have a specific sound? I wondered why my girlfriend had not kicked me out for my endless prattling.
Long before the invention of electric guitars and amplifiers, Brooklyn’s history of artistic and eccentric personalities goes all the way back to Walt Whitman, perhaps the first real Brooklyn (dare I say it) hipster. If you doubt me, just take a look at Whitman’s photo on the Library of Congress edition of Leaves of Grass and walk out on Bedford Avenue on any Saturday afternoon. Let’s just say that look has stood the test of time.