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.