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May 2008 will see the launch of The Douglass Street Music Collective, an artist-run rehearsal and performance space in Brooklyn’s historic Gowanus district.
Changes in the New York City real estate market have seen the recent closure of many seminal venues for jazz and creative music. The Douglass Street Music Collective was conceived as a creative response to a challenging situation: a space for rehearsing, composing, teaching and performing creative music. The DSMC’s 14 members represent independent bandleaders covering a range of musical interests – from jazz and classical music to free improvisation and world music – and all of the spaces in between.
Gowanus – a district of factories bordered on one side by Park Slope and the other by the Gowanus Canal – was once the bustling centre of New York City’s industrial waterfront. Recently it has become the site of a creative revival, with performers, artists, and craftspeople working in converted industrial spaces.
The DSMC’s Douglass Street space was first a soap factory, then the site of the Center for Improvisational Music. When CIM director Ralph Alessi moved his educational programs to alternate premises, he circulated an email among Brooklyn musicians in hope that the space could be maintained as a venue for creative music. In January 2008, DSMC executive directors Tanya Kalmanovitch and Joel Lambdin – both classically trained string players operating from different sides of the music world – assumed the lease with the support of 12 other musicians drawn mainly from Brooklyn’s jazz scene.
From May 29 through June 1 at the Douglass Street Music Collective’s premises in Gowanus, Brooklyn, the NYC group will present their first festival to officially launch the space. The festival will feature all 14 members leading their own ensembles in performances of adventurous original music.
Kalmanovitch and Lambdin conceive of the DSMC as a rehearsal and performance space configured to accommodate members’ diverse musical and professional needs. In addition to their own performances, DSMC members will curate performances by local and international artists such as the Hofstra String Quartet (May 3) and a festival for the new Portland OR based KMB-Jazz label featuring Joe Morris, Sabir Mateen and Roy Campbell (June 8-9).
Central to the DSMC is a comprehensive offering of workshops and private instruction in jazz, classical music and improvisation for school aged students, emerging professionals, and adult amateur musicians. The DSMC will partner with Connection Works, a Brooklyn-based non-profit organization, to being music to the Brooklyn community in new ways. Regular open sessions will bring together musicians from a variety of creative musical scenes in an expression of the spirit of creativity, community, and a do-it-yourself initiative that has always kept New York City at the forefront of the international creative music community.
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