Is Brooklyn the New Downtown?

{Written for Newsday during the strangely lively dog days of August ...}

Downtown isn't what it used to be. It's not even where it used to be. Ever the roost for New York's creative bohemians, neighborhoods like the East Village and the Lower East Side have fostered grassroots arts scenes for decades. But the era of affordable rents and accommodating venues, which made all this possible, has faded fast.

As real estate values soar and landmark music clubs such as the Bottom Line and CBGB have been shuttered or threatened with eviction, artists and entrepreneurs have taken flight. Once, the so-called downtown scene celebrated free-ranging sensibilities in which genre boundaries, particularly musical ones, were gleefully blurred.

Now, geographic lines are blurring. More and more, it's Brooklyn -- and its neighborhoods in immediate reach of Manhattan - that looks like the new "downtown."

"Musicians were living there but there wasn't a scene before," said Anthony Coleman, a pianist and composer who lives in the East Village but often finds himself riding the F train to Brooklyn for gigs. "It's not like the scene is dead here, but Brooklyn is where it's gone."

Coleman is symbolic of the shift. One of the core members in a closely knit circle of musicians who defined the downtown jazz scene in the 1980s and '90s, he celebrates his 50th birthday this week with a pair of concerts. They won't be in striking distance of his tenement apartment, near the former residences of Allen Ginsberg and Charlie Parker. Instead, two Brooklyn venues will host: Barbes, in Park Slope, and the Issue Project Room, a non-profit space on the Gowanus Canal, where events are staged in a renovated concrete silo.

"It was amazing when Barbes started," said Coleman, who once was a regular at the Knitting Factory, a sprawling TriBeCa club that made its name with avant-garde jazz but now rarely books it. "The fact that it built so quickly into a scene made a lot of sense. I never thought of Park Slope as a happening place, but Barbes gave it focus."

The shoebox-shaped bar was opened in 2001 by a pair of expatriate Parisians, Olivier Conan and Vincent Douglas. They began booking a lot of improvisatory jazz and traditional string music, and now give whole evenings over to Balkan and Brazilian-themed dance bands. Partly, this was because they liked an eclectic vibe. Also, noise-control regulations mandated that they keep the volume down. Even though its back room barely holds 40 people, the venue draws some unexpected luminaries to its intimate confines. Neighborhood literary icon Paul Auster likes to drop in. On occasion, mellow pop divas Norah Jones or Madeleine Peyroux might slip up to the stage to sing with their pal, violinist Jenny Scheinman, one of several players with weekly residences there.

"This neighborhood has a sense of community that's slowly disappearing from the East Village," said Conan, a musician himself, who wanted a space to showcase the abundance of local talent. "Most of the people who play here live within a 10-block radius."

Club regular Roy Nathanson, a saxophonist who performs every Sunday with a workshop ensemble, has embraced Brooklyn as a cultural refugee. He sold his East Village apartment and moved back to his native Flatbush after his co-op board refused to let him practice his horn in the building. "They wouldn't even let me soundproof," said Nathanson, whose band the Jazz Passengers has featured vocalists Debbie Harry (of Blondie fame) and Elvis Costello. "This has been the new downtown for a long time, but it's more spread out."

Brooklyn hasn't lacked for cultural institutions. The Brooklyn Academy of Music has, during the past 20 years, become a blue-chip arts hub in Fort Greene. Choreographer Mark Morris opened his Dance Center down the block in 2001. St. Ann's Warehouse, an expanded facility for the non-profit presenter Arts and St. Ann's, opened the same year in DUMBO, in a renovated spice warehouse. What's different now is that everyday venues have begun to pop up. And not only in Williamsburg, which has long functioned as an adjunct to the East Village, with scores of art galleries, and a promising alternative theater scene.

The Issue Project Room is one such arrival. The non-profit's director, Suzanne Foil, lost her space in the East Village earlier this year but quickly latched onto a new site. The building, a former storage silo, is circular, which allows for unusual staging. "It's outrageous," said Fiol, whose programs feature experimental jazz and chamber music, electronic sounds, poetry readings, film screenings and even theme dinners. "People tell me it's their favorite building in the whole city."

The obscure location, adjacent to the Carroll Street bridge at the Gowanus Canal, hasn't deterred audiences. It's only a 10-minute walk from Smith Street, Brooklyn's popular "restaurant row." And artists have been responsive. Fiol has already forged ongoing partnerships with composer Pauline Oliveros and her Deep Listening Institute, and will host a 2006 residency with the Ne(x)tworks Ensemble, which features the avant-garde soprano Joan La Barbara. Coming events include an evening devoted to short story readings, with the author Grace Paley, and a 36-hour concert to inaugurate the space's 16-channel speaker installation. "If I was going to have to go anywhere," said Fiol, a photographer and former gallery manager who lucked onto the commercial rental, "this is where I would want to go."

Coleman, who performs there Tuesday in the first of his two birthday events, will be coming full circle. He grew up a few blocks away in Cobble Hill. As a teenager, he took lessons from jazz piano great Jaki Byard, and spent all his spare time hanging out at jazz clubs. "Thelonious Monk, Cecil Taylor, Earl Hines and Duke, that would be a good week," he says, name-checking a shortlist of piano heroes. "That was a normal week." Along with such peers as guitarist Marc Ribot and Bill Frisell, and saxophonists John Zorn and Tim Berne, among many others, Coleman became a central figure in a thriving new music scene in the mid-1980s.

A man given to affably encyclopedic discourses, the composer works out of thoughtful conceptual backdrops that display a sharp wit. His piano trio Sephardic Tinge explores Jewish themes as a galloping collision between Jelly Roll Morton and the Borscht Belt by way of Spanish Harlem. It takes a cue from Morton's dictum that jazz must evoke "the Spanish tinge."

"Salsa was more an ethnic music for me than Jewish music ever was," he said. Another combo, Selfhaters, is a joke on the idea of the self-hating assimilated Jew. As Coleman explained, he was trying to separate himself from the '90s klezmer revival. "I wanted to send things reeling a little bit," he said, "in a trickster, joker, gadfly way."

The Tuesday night concert, with a cast of sidekicks that includes bassist Greg Cohen and saxophonist Michael Attias, deals with Coleman as a composer. Its centerpiece is an ambitious revival of the 1998 chamber quintet piece "The Abysmal Richness of the Infinite Proximity of the Same." The music "sits there," he said, "and it evolves, and it degenerates, and it evolves again, and then it loses it. And I really like that." The following night, Coleman will lead two different improvising trios at Barbes. Those shows, he said, will offer some relief. "When you start rehearsing this stuff, you realize why you don't do it very often."

Despite his frequent appearances in the borough, Coleman doesn't expect to join the downtown diaspora, even as it continues to grow. "How many musicians from the downtown scene live in Brooklyn? Most of them," he said. Who's left? "Only those of us who have apartments that we'd be crazy to give up."