The Williamsburg Avant-Garde

“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, author of Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century

“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, author of Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde

"The Williamsburg Avant-Garde is the most comprehensive study to date of one of the most important music scenes of the past 30-plus years." - Dave Mandl, The Wire

"Well-researched. . . . Drawing on these first-hand accounts as well as on his access to the personal archives of some of the artists involved, Bradley provides a lively account of the neighborhood’s vital experimental music movement from its underground beginnings in various squats and abandoned industrial sites to its eventual dissolution in the face of rising rents and gentrification." - Daniel Barbiero, Point of Departure

"One of the most important strengths of The Williamsburg Avant-Garde is that it elaborates with equal care, regardless of idiom or generation, on the intentions, ideas and aesthetic strategies of the highly diverse range of artists who could find a platform there. . . . What makes Bradley’s archeology at the same time so urgently contemporary is that so many of the artists covered are alive and active right now, even if a good number of them may still be underground." - Patrick Brennan, Arteidolia

"Bradley’s vivid portraits of the dynamic interactions between musicians, curators, and other participants behind the Williamsburg avant-garde scene are made possible by way of his extensive interviews with scene participants that provide the bulk of the data in his book. These interviewees illuminate important information that would be difficult to find in any written record." - David Pearson, Notes

"The Williamsburg Avant-Garde is a comprehensive and exhaustive output of Bradley’s research. . . . [A]n extremely valuable contribution to the fields of both music studies and New York City history. - Theodore Gordon, Journal of the American Musicological Society

"The Williamsburg Avant-Garde is a must read not only for avant-garde music aficionados, but for anybody interested in understanding how and why creativity bursts in some places at certain times." - Sebastien Doubinsky, Seismograf

"A densely layered, kaleidoscopic musicological treatise, The Williamsburg Avant-Garde draws on hundreds of interviews, articles, essays, and recordings to describe the historical impact of a daunting array of musicians, ensembles, musical genres, stylistic innovations, and movements, and the Northern Brooklyn locales that fostered them. . . . Bradley’s highly detailed chronicle, with its abundance of black-and-white photos and other archival material, reveals the direct, scrappy, creative energy of the time. It celebrates a watershed generation of alternative currents to mainstream entertainment, in the form of purposeful 'irritainment,' and it reads as a powerful manifesto for the shared artistic visions and cross-cultural pollinations of artists driven by a fearless anti-commercial desire to tinker and explore. . . ." - Brendan Riley, Los Angeles Review of Books

"The Williamsburg Avant-Garde will captivate readers with a pre-existing predilection for outside-the-box music. Bradley’s prose is engaging, and the grainy black-and-white photographs complement his storytelling. He writes with academic rigor based on forensic research, but his lively style channels the energy from the people and places at the heart of Williamsburg’s scene. Rezoning laws may have kicked this lively, artistic community down the road into Bushwick, Ridgewood and beyond, but Bradley’s book makes a valuable contribution to keeping its memory alive." - Matty Bannond, New York City Jazz Record