Live Venue View: Barbés – Music that Breaks Boundaries
Barbés is an unusual venue. It’s a rare place where you can walk through the door on almost any evening, expect to hear a band that you’ve never heard of before, and practically without fail, that band will be amazing.
It’s hard to say precisely what kind of music is played at Barbés. Some people might call it “world” music, but that doesn’t begin to do it justice. Co-owner Olivier Conan says “I don’t like to call it that, because I’m not quite sure what it means. I’m from the ‘world’, you know. It doesn’t mean much most of the time.”
Olivier Conan
“Mostly I think we play music that I like to call ‘impure,’” Conan says in his lightly faded French accent. “Music that does not adhere to a strict guidelines; That is always idiosyncratic and led by someone’s vision. All manner of hybrid experiments, really. It often involves some form of ethnic roots, but not always. It’s driven by taste, my taste, and by what I like.”
Conan first moved to the States roughly 30 years ago. He was in his twenties, came to visit an American girlfriend and never left. “New York is just that kind of place,” he says.
While in the city, he worked a series of “odd jobs,” played in bands, and landed a long-running gig at the midtown Manhattan venue, Town Hall. In 2002, Olivier Conan finally decided to start his own venue along with business partner and bandmate, Vincent Douglas. There, he could book the bands that made sense to him.
“It was right after 9/11,” says Conan. “That had an impact and an influence. I kind of declared my allegiance to the city” ‘This is my town. This is where I live.’ I can’t think of where else I would have opened it.”
Becoming Part of Brooklyn
Barbés, now in its 11th year, predates many of the music venues that now operate in South Brooklyn. The club has even outlived some of the old standbys, including the much larger Southpaw, which once stood on 5th Avenue, not far from where the Barclays Center has since landed.
This venue, on the corner of 9th Street and 6th Avenue in Park Slope is barely larger than your average coffee shop. But the drinks are varied and inexpensive, the shows – and the crowds – are near-constant, and the cover is never more than $10. (Which, much like a museum, the club often usually collects in the form of a suggested donation. A little bit of positive social pressure seems to do the trick nicely.)
What makes the music here so constantly appealing is that the performers often tend to be musicians’ musicians. Performances are unusually refreshing, intimate, electrifying – an experience that almost invariably expands one’s sense of musical and cultural boundaries. It is like an incubator for performers who offer a palpable mixture of musicianship, individuality and dignified grit which is so uncommon today, especially in smaller venues.
Red Baraat. Photo courtesy of Brooklyn Nerd/Flickr
Sets at Barbés tend to be sophisticated enough that one would be hard-pressed to find discerning audience members absently twiddling about on their smartphones, yet rhythmic enough – often danceable enough – to strike even non-musicians as instantly and broadly accessible.
“I’m not a fan of ‘virtuosity’ in theory,” says Conan when I press him about it. “In practice? Sure – I like musicians who are confident; Who at least know their instrument in such a way, and have thought about it in such a way, that it usually appeals to other musicians. If virtuosity is just being good at what you do, then yes. I appreciate that. You do have a proportion of musicians in the audience that is very high.”
Conan hadn’t come from a musical family himself, but had always found himself attracted to the stuff. At first, it was the classical and French chanson that was in the air around him, and then the pop music of his generation. When he moved in with what he calls a “surrogate” Venezuelan family later in his teenage years, he got interested in Latin music quickly, soon finding himself steeped in early salsa, jazz, and the recordings of Cuban bassist and composer, Cachao López.
Olivier Conan now plays Barbés every Monday night in his own Latin hybrid band, Chicha Libre. On Tuesdays, you’ll find the fiery Balkan brass band, Slavic Soul Party, who have become an increasingly popular attraction in recent years. And all nights of the week play host to a constant stream of remarkably ambitious and inventive players who often take hold of ethnic traditions, reshape them, and use them to smash through boundaries.
Repeat Performers, Repeat Customers
Residencies, like the one Conan himself plays on Monday nights, are a common theme at Barbés. It’s a place where the focus lies less on one-off performances and touring bands, and more on prolonged artist development.
Slavic Soul Party at Barbés. Photo courtesy of Jaka Vinsek/Flickr
“Ongoing residencies have helped,” says Conan, “not only to popularize new bands, but to create an image for what the venue is. So people who come see one band will usually end up liking another band.”
“The key,” he says, “is to treat musicians well, and give them a home where they can grow and experiment. If you’re not there for the long haul, it’s just not going to work. If you’re just looking at it night-by-night, saying ‘This didn’t bring in enough revenue, we’re not going to book them again’, then that’s just not going to work.
“Some bands don’t have an audience – and you have to let them develop one. It’s almost like a publishing house,” he says. “You have books that do well and books that don’t, and you have to somehow average it out in a way that brings in a positive revenue.”
This can strike a denizen of the internet age like an attitude of another era. But perhaps it’s one worth revisiting:
“Develop talent and give them a place where they feel they have a home, and where they’re well-treated and they can try whatever they want,” he says. “Barbés has been kind of a laboratory for some people. Some bands end up doing well and bringing in more people and we benefit from that. A band like Slavic Soul Party at first did not have an audience. They got one, fairly quickly, but for the first 6 months, it was pretty rough.”
Conan says that the most successful musicians at Barbés are often those who end up playing in a variety of projects and venues, some more commercial than others. And it’s unlikely that any of them would get the bulk of their income from his club alone:
“I’d love to provide that for musicians,” says Conan, “but it’s too small of a place. It is a place to develop new projects and new sounds that sometimes do well in other places and go on the road. In a place like New York, you have got to be working every day to stay here. So people take a lot of jobs. Some people get to only take the jobs they like, which is very lucky.”
Music as Conversation
Conan, an immigrant to the states and a business owner, was born into a communist family back in France. But his own views on markets, especially the one for music, seem to be a far cry from that system:
“Although there was a lot of money given to the arts in communist countries,” he says, “it was often with the most rigid of approach, especially with traditional folk music.
Brass Messengers at Barbés. Photo courtesy of hankplank/Flickr
“When you think of Bulgarian vocal music, it was like taking the village folk music and codifying it in a way where everything had to be made strict after that. There was no room for changing things, for innovation. So in many ways, communism was not a way to have music evolve. It did not really emphasize individuality.
“I don’t believe there is such a thing as ‘pure music’ or a ‘golden standard’ for any kind of music. There is this idea that any form of music had its ‘golden age,’ when all its rules were laid out, and it should be respected as such. That’s especially true in a lot of traditional music: in Irish music, in Cajun music, even in jazz – although perhaps a bit less so.
“But any music, in any style or genre, is always in movement. Every musician brings something new, brings something that he borrows from other places, from neighbors, from new impressions, from changes in the world. That has been going on forever. So in that way, all music is impure. I think it is important to remember that there is no such thing as a golden standard for art in general.”
Some of these new ethnic “hybrids” that Conan has been instigating and championing for decades have recently been slipping further and further into the mainstream. “Even in super-mainstream musicians like Vampire Weekend or Beirut, you see some of these influences.”
“We’ve seen Eastern European music become more mainstream in the past 3 or 4 years. Now, it seems to me like every kid who would have wanted to join the circus or a punk rock band in another generation, wants to join an Eastern European band now.
“Latin America is also back, much more so than it was 10 years ago. Salsa is cool again. I mean, it was always cool in my heart. But now there are a lot of reissues of things like the Fania-era salsa. Living in New York, that kind of thing was not taken seriously during the 90s at all, and I’m really happy to see that it’s back. Latin culture is getting more important across America as well. There are now kids who are 2nd or 3rd generation who are steeped in mainstream American Anglo culture, but also have a new understanding of Latin music and culture in a way that is different than their parents’.”
All currents ebb and flow, but to a significant degree, new trends in mainstream popular music will always begin in petri dishes like this one.
Keeping the Conversation Going
There’s a lot that Barbés does right. It helps support musicians as they develop new and ambitious original projects. It invests time in letting artists hone their craft and develop the skills and the repertoire that will attract new audiences in the future.
When the venue charges a cover or passes the hat, it never takes a cut: a full 100% of proceeds go to the musicians, which is unusual. The entirety of the club’s revenue comes from bar sales. But with this approach, it also faces some serious challenges:
Stephane Wrembel at Barbés. Photo courtesy of de-lineation/Flickr.
“It’s not the greatest business model, to tell you the truth,” says Conan. “The cost of operating a business in New York City has really surged in the past four years. I don’t know how long Barbés can be sustained. It has to be done more for the love of it than to make a living. A business like ours has a very, very small profit margin, so it doesn’t take that much of an increase to change things.
“The increasing cost of doing business has just been catastrophic for so many businesses our size,” he says. But the challenges aren’t what all of us might expect: “Sure, there is of course the basic stuff that just gets more expensive every year: Taxes, buying stock for the bar. We have had a rent increase – Not crazy crazy, but crazy enough. But it’s really the level of scrutiny and fines that has made it very difficult. You’re really talking about thousands of dollars a year in fees and fines that the city is able to think up. Having to adhere to more and more standardized codes – That’s cost us a lot of money.
Today, when you walk into Barbés, it seems as vibrant as ever. The ambience is unassuming and unpretentious, but attractive. The bar is well stocked, the music is incredible. But you also get the sense, as one does in so many New York venues, that this club’s place in the world is like the perfect performance: tenuous, transitory, almost too good to remain true forever.
At the moment, it would be impossible for me to imagine Park Slope and South Brooklyn without Barbés. But then, you look around and think about how much changes, and just how fast, in this city. There was a time when CBGB’s was synonymous with the Lower East Side.
But Barbés has at least one thing still going for it: A consistent stream of incredible and inventive music, and at a price that’s more than fair. It has crowds and it has customers, and it continuously showcases music worth hearing at the precise time that music both wants to be heard, and is ready to spread.
Ultimately, venues like this can only survive based on the choices we make as individuals. They only get to stay when the surrounding community shows that it cares enough. Enough to leave the house, lay their dollars down, and bring their friends.
Barbés has managed to attract good, sustaining crowds for 11 years now. As far as New York businesses go, that is an unqualified success.
In case costs were ever to get so far out of hand (and creative ways to increase revenue didn’t seem keep pace) then Conan is thinking ahead. It seems he could imagine a lot of ways to keep the music coming. He could imagine a larger venue, he could imagine a different block, he could imagine reorganizing and reopening elsewhere as a non-profit.
But mostly, he can imagine where he’ll be this Monday night, and every Monday night for the foreseeable future: Playing with his band, Chicha Libre, at the venue he started.
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