Bohemia in Brooklyn

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The collective also operates an independent artist-run label, BJU Records. “Artists retain ownership of their recordings and buy in to BJU Records’ community,” explains collective member and violist/violinist Tanya Kalmanovitch. The artists benefit from the label’s national publicity, distribution, and sales services.

The group has filed for nonprofit status, which will allow it to apply for grants to fund performances and provide educational programming to underserved local communities—an approach that is consistent with the BJU’s “flexible, community-oriented, do-it-yourself approach to the business of artistic life,” Kalmanovitch says. The Juilliard-trained strings player has also been working with another Brooklyn organization, the Douglass Street Music Collective, which launched with a festival of new music last spring.

There’s an explicitly global sound in much of the music. About half the BJU members incorporate elements of their heritage into their music, from Sunny Jain’s pan-Indian concepts to Kalmanovitch’s jazz-infused cover of a Russian folk tune. Barbès often features the Peruvian garage-folk of Chicha Libre, the co-owners’ band. At a recent show at Rose Live Music, vocalist Samita Sinha mixed the classical Hindustani music in which she was trained with elements of jazz.

Even with the benefit of Brooklyn’s current music scene, John Ellis posits that in order to make a living playing jazz, a musician in any of New York’s boroughs must think creatively, taking on international tours and commercial gigs and other sources of income.

“The myth of New York as a center of art endures,” notes Ellis, who worries about the fractured nature of New York’s jazz community in general. “But the reality is that it is not possible to live a bohemian lifestyle in New York City unless you have some special arrangement. I just asked [saxophonist] Joel Frahm this same question,” he adds. “He just moved to Brooklyn after 20 years in Manhattan. He said, ‘Brooklyn feels like Manhattan used to feel when I first moved to town.’ ”

Jennifer Odell writes for Down Beat, Relix, and People.

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