Thursday July 6 * 7pm * TICKETS

Join us for a book talk and public conversation led by Cisco Bradley, followed by music from Baltimore duo Pwisans Ete'nel.

Cisco Bradley's new book, The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront (Duke University Press, 2023), covers the underground, experimental, and improvised music scene there between the late 1980s and the early 2010s. The book portrays an entire community and all that they were able to create, while also dealing with gentrification and other forms of marginalization through that time. This is a scene that has produced many accomplished figures such as Mary Halvorson, Matana Roberts, Nate Wooley, Peter Evans, Jessica Pavone, Taylor Ho Bynum, and many, many others.

The Williamsburg Avant-Garde was written to provide a rich and illuminating overview of a particular time and place in the world of cutting-edge music and culture. Williamsburg has since been gentrified and corporatized to the point of little resemblance to the thriving and vibrant cultural center it once was. This book documents that era in great detail.

Cisco Bradley is a history professor at the Pratt Institute and the editor of Jazz Right Now, an online publication and archive that has illuminated much of the scene covered in the book. His previous book, Universal Tonality: The Life and Music of William Parker (Duke University Press, 2021), chronicled the life of the influential free jazz bassist.

Pwisans Ete'nel is a duo comprised of two of Baltimore’s leading artist, multi-instrumentalist Jamal Moore and Bashi Rose (Film and Percussion). Their aim is to journey into the spiritual abyss channeling ancestral roots through music. “If the music is not played with pure intention from the heart and soul, then what is it worth,” asks Bashi Rose. Together they will be bringing in new sonic chemistry of sound via composition and heavy improvisational synergy.