The Williamsburg Avant-Garde

The Williamsburg Avant-Garde

Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront

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.

  • “With a sharp eye for detail and an awareness of broad cultural implications, Cisco Bradley has captured a clear image of an elusive moment, vividly chronicling an artistic movement and social scene as distinctive as it is historically significant. The Williamsburg he lays out is a staunchly alternative confederation of improvisers, performance artists, painters, poets, and sculptors all united in their renegade stature. This is an authoritative book on a creative foment that has often gone unrecognized in the discourse around experimental music in New York.”

    — Nate Chinen, NPR

  • “Cisco Bradley compellingly guides readers through the successive adaptations of the experimental music community to a rapidly changing Williamsburg environment, from industrial graveyard to overpriced bohemia. In offering the first book-length account of the rich musical life in Williamsburg's heyday, Bradley showcases experimental music while accentuating the life-and-death struggles of musicians in the face of creeping gentrification. This highly impactful book makes an excellent contribution to the literature on experimental music.”

    — Bernard Gendron

Pratt Institute Professor, Author, & Music Curator

Cisco Bradley has been associate professor of history at the Pratt Institute since 2011. He is the author of three books, the most recent of which are The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront (Duke University Press, 2023) and Universal Tonality: The Life and Music of William Parker (Duke University Press, 2021). He is also editor of www.jazzrightnow.com. He founded the Free Jazz Oral History Project in 2016 and is Chairperson of New Revolution Arts, Inc., a non-profit organization that supports experimental music in New York City.