Celebrating Barbès at 20: The Sounds of Brooklyn

A confluence of serendipity, musical obsession and financial naivety coincided to lead French musicians Olivier Conan and Vincent Douglas to co-found the music venue Barbès in Brooklyn in 2002. “We didn’t have any investors, it was just the old-fashioned American Dream, all on credit cards,” says Conan wryly. Located in a narrow former Chinese laundromat, the venue shortly thereafter became the epicentre of Peruvian chicha – and other global sounds – and over the course of the last two decades, evolved into a record label and, most recently, inspired a namesake festival as well.

Slavic Soul Party at Barbès (photo by Stephen Ferry)

Barbès gave Conan the possibility of “a fantasy world, essentially,” he explains, “only curating the kind of stuff that I liked, that was not necessarily popular.” He named it after the African neighbourhood in Paris’ 18th arrondissement in which, as a teen, he had been able to find unique music. “The idea,” he says, “was to very simply create a space where there would be the kind of music that we were not able to see somewhere else.”

Barbès quickly began garnering positive press — appearing in a cartoon in The New Yorker and by 2013 Songlines referred to it as ‘the hippest, hottest little club in Brooklyn.’ It presented grooves from Tuvan throat singers and Balkan-Mexican-Indian brass beats to jazz-infused Gnawa, Slavic soul and everything in between. During Barbès’ first years, an interest in South American music led Conan to explore Peruvian criollo music, resulting in a 2004 trip to the country which turned him on to chicha, a 1960s-born, psychedelic, guitar-driven cumbia. He returned with hundreds of records, soon to be distilled into the first of two volumes of the definitive compilation of the genre’s gems, The Roots of Chicha. These compilations were released on Barbès’ own label, launched in order to produce records of the music that Conan loved, including two bands he also co-founded, Las Rubias del Norte and Chicha Libre.

Barbès founders Vincent Douglas and Olivier Conan (photo by Aylin Gungor)

All of Conan’s endeavours centre around the artists, affording a safe space and home for them to work on their more personal and quirky projects, as well as building a music-loving community around their efforts. One such group was local NYC artists Banda de los Muertos, the side project of several of Brooklyn’s highly accomplished jazz musicians who had become enamoured with banda, a rambunctious, horn-heavy regional Mexican music that echoes its connections to European waltzes, polkas and military bands of Mexico’s past. Banda de los Muertos’ self-titled release, in fact, caught the attention of the most iconic banda of all, Mexico’s Banda el Recodo, who then came to New York City to record a video of one of their tunes in situ at Barbès. That video has been viewed over 350 million times. It’s fascinating, says Conan, to create something that comes full circle: “A bunch of musicians in New York being inspired by musicians in Mexico and those very Mexican musicians coming back to New York to close the circle and meet them – that’s what we do this for!”

Every project has a similar story, as Conan’s adventuresome aesthetics fuels explorations that result in some tangible musical gift to audacious listeners. In the course of compiling the second volume of The Roots of Chicha, he met Los Wembler’s de Iquitos, an iconic chicha band composed of five brothers. Conan was excited to see that as a seminal band in the genre, they were not only still playing, but also staying true to their 1968 style. Over the course of ten years, Conan helped Los Wembler’s de Iquitos go on the road in Europe and the US, and produced two of their records. It was an unrepeatable privilege to have seen them live thanks to Conan, as a devastating coda to this story is that two of the brothers died during the pandemic.

Mamady Kouyaté & Mamady Kourouma at Barbès (photo by Aylin Gungor)

Most recently, Barbès Records has supported Miramar, the side project of the leaders of cult salsa orchestra Bio Ritmo, who celebrated the music of extraordinary Puerto Rican bolero composer Sylvia Rexach’s 100th anniversary with a February 2022 release and video. “I love people who work with tradition and tweak it and change it and pollute it, people who are both connected to their community or to other people’s communities and create something that’s totally original and unique – that makes me happy.”

Despite the pandemic, the renowned bar, performance space and musical incubator continues to evolve and expand its reach. Barbès in the Woods, an outdoor festival in homage to the Brooklyn venue, is now approaching its third year. Edo Mor from Laudable Productions, a cultural event agency, was so inspired by Conan’s work he conceived the proposal to co-curate the festival. As we go to press, the third edition of Barbès in the Woods is still in the planning stages, given an ongoing search for a new location so the festival can take place in 2023 if not in 2022.

Conan takes such changes and detours on the road less travelled quite philosophically. “Sometimes I am baffled we still survive. But here we are… every time something collapses, something else gets built. I get pessimistic sometimes, but I’m always pleasantly surprised.” When asked what advice he would give his younger self after two decades of Barbès, he muses, “if it doesn’t kill you, keep doing it. But it all depends on what you want from life – and what one needs the most is meaning. I try to only do things that are meaningful.”

Visit: www.barbesbrooklyn.com

This article originally appeared in the July 2022 issue of Songlines magazine. Never miss an issue – subscribe today