Considering all the pros and cons we will move the event to nublu. 151 Ave C (between 9th & 10th Streets)

PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD AND UPDATE ANY INVITES AND PROMO THAT WENT OUT!!! THANK YOU!!

THIS IS STILL A FREE EVENT

IT”S STILL GOING TO BE GREAT!!!!!
SEE YOU TOMORROW!!

This is a free show Friday, July 9th, 3-7pm

The MOMENT NYC L.E.S. Community Music Festival – Celebrating LES music diversity – Friday, July 9th, 3-7pm. Presented by MOMENT NYC, sponsored by the Local 802 AFM Musicians Performance Trust Fund, the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, and in support of Music Workers Alliance (MWA), and the East River Park Action to Save the Park!

MOMENT NYC – the Museum of Music & Entertainment in New York City, is celebrating Lower East Side music diversity at the East River Amphitheater Friday, July 9th with local musicians of all ages who have been part of the downtown music scene, in some cases for multiple decades. The Lower East has been home to diverse music since the Black and Tans and dives of the 1800s, where transgender and racially mixed underground music, dance, and drinking paved the way for a century of artists and scenes that followed. MOMENT NYC’s mission is to preserve NYC independent and underground music diversity. For over a hundred years New York City has been a breeding ground for new music and a mecca for musicians worldwide, but in recent years it seems more a place for rich investors and has become increasingly inhospitable to the underground and independent artists that helped create new music scenes that changed the world, such as: stride, swing, bebop, cool, free jazz, fusion, mambo, boogaloo, salsa, do wop, disco, house, folk, minimalism, punk, new wave, and hip hop. While the Lower East Side was not the point where all this music originated, the LES has always held an especially important place in the art and music world where anything was possible and all was tried. The true innovations in NYC music mostly occurred in non-institutional, diverse, small underground communities. This event will celebrate that aesthetic and history. With Grammy-nominated NYC Groove Collective as the core band, this event will feature players who have lived and performed in the area over many years — musicians who have worked with people such as Celia Cruz, Tupac Shakur, the Sugar Hill Gang, D’angelo, The Jazz Passengers, The Lounge Lizards, Brooklyn Gypsies, Lee Scratch Perry, Subatomic Sound System, Curtis Mayfield, John Zorn, The Skatalites, Pharaoh Sanders, and many others. This event is being presented by MOMENT NYC whose mission is to preserve NYC independent and underground music diversity. MOMENT NYC has been providing NYC music history to students in the Lower East Side, Brooklyn, and the Bronx and has presented events in spaces like the NY Library for the Performing Arts, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, University of Virginia, and in NYC public gardens and DIY spaces with programs and events that focus on local music history and important figures who deserve greater recognition, like Gil Evans and David Mancuso. The Lower East Side has struggled to get its fair share of resources, one of New York City’s first neighborhoods, it became the infamous Five Points where violence, indulgence, and debauchery kept many away, and for periods it has been left to survive on its own with inconsistent assistance from the city, and survive it did! Lower East Side resilience comes from its undeniable grit and the tenacity of a will to continue outside the boundaries of “normal” society. Even gentrification has been unable to fully convert this area and in some cases interlopers, as they assimilate, have found themselves de-gentrified.

There has been news of preserving the Amphitheater and the Ecology Center which have been important parts of the community for decades. However, as the entire park will be raised, it is hard to imagine they will not have to be completely rebuilt. After years of planning a coastal resiliency project designed to protect the Lower East Side, many have been disillusioned by a process that left community voices out. Some demands have been met, but only after the plans and good faith of 4 years work, with the local residents, was unilaterally and secretly scrapped. Many protests were held but the plans are now in motion to completely rebuild East River Park. The last time the East River Park was renovated, work that was estimated to take 3 years, left the park closed for 10 years.