Dollars
Performing at Barbés
376 9th St., Park Slope, Brooklyn
Nov. 2, 2023
Warning: This article is going to read less like a review, and more like a love-letter to a new crush.
Any organizer or booker can plan a Friday or Saturday show. It’s easy: Hire the biggest band possible, the one with the most Instagram followers; or, hire the same guys that’ve packed the house previously. Done and done, hands clean, rack up the cash.
If you want to know the true measure of a venue, go on an off night.
Barbés, located in a dismally unhip part of a generally unhip neighborhood, Park Slope, might be one of the coolest places I’ve popped into in a long time. And on Thursday night I really did just pop in. I knew nothing of the band that was scheduled to play (Abdullah Ibrahim tribute trio, Dollars), and very little of the venue outside of the fact that I’d never heard a bad word said about it.
I’d been looking for this place for years. The irony of New York, of living in this sea of options, free to choose from anything and everything, whatever you need found somewhere, is the difficultly of finding what you need. Whether you keep going to same places over and over again because the choice of change is too monumental, or you never return to the same place twice for fear of missing out of something you’d not known off — you’re always going to miss something.
In looking for this place, pining after a specific memory from my years in Indianapolis. In Indy there is a club call the Chatterbox, where there’s always music and the drinks are always cheap. It’s a neighborhood bar that takes it’s programming seriously, regulars hang with the band, and the band becomes the regulars. Barbés is the closest thing I’ve found to this vibe: A bar with room to belly-up enough strangers to get a real hang going, as much cross-talk and bought-rounds as there should be; a quiet playlist of Gypsy jazz and murmuring Be-Bop, Fernet Branca $9 for a heavy handed pour, passable Guinness.
And that décor! Tin ceilings, dark wood, tchotchkes on every flat surface and tucked in every corner. The place feels like it was torn out of a certain type of expat’s frayed paperback’s vision of Paris — which was intentional: see the venue’s origins.
This is what a “jazz” club should be: A bar where the music is always good and always happening.
All this is to say nothing of the music last night. Certainly don’t want to leave the band unmentioned. Dollars (pictured above) — Giancarlo Vulcano (guitar), Taylor Bergren-Chrisman (bass), and Greg Stare (drums and harmonica) — played a truly vibey set of tunes written and inspired by South African pianist and activist Abdullah Ibrahim. (If you don’t know, now you know; check him out, excellent stuff.)
It’s a joyous music. In the word of Bergren-Chrisman, “deeply felt, but intentionally quiet.” Nothing better for sipping liquor and relaxing than a set of unremitting pleasantness that oscillates between hymn tune and James Brown get-down. A bare bones ensemble, not an ounce of pretention, melodies worth humming along to, grooves worth sinking in … Simple. Done. Perfect.
If at night at Barbés reminded me of anything, it was that going to a show need be nothing more than a refined leisure activity, like reading a book instead of watching television or going to the theater (cinema or live) instead of queuing up Netflix. As someone who is always seeking out some sort of transcendental experience from the art I consume — always looking for something to jerk the stubborn tears from my face— a Thursday at Barbés has served me well. One can simply have a drink and vibe. When a life is well-lived, it need not be changed.
Catch y’all at the next one, any night of the week …
