Martín Perna (Antibalas, Dap-Kings, Soul Providers, Daktaris, Ocote Soul Sounds, Martez)
"When I started Antibalas in ‘98, probably ten or so of the fourteen guys lived within walking or biking distance...So it did really feel like a neighborhood band."
I rag on NYU a lot for swallowing up most of the East and West Villages, but I’ll readily admit that I have the institution to thank for drawing and nurturing a significant number of quintessential NYC musicians, from Anohni to Rick Rubin to Interpol. In fact, three seemingly disparate Brooklyn-based bands whose music practically defined the borough when I arrived in the mid-’00s - Antibalas, Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, and TV on the Radio - can trace their roots back to three close friends who met at NYU: Martín Perna, Gabriel Roth, and Tunde Adebimpe.
Speaking as a fan, I would have liked to write about both Antibalas, which Perna formed and leads to this day, and Roth’s record label Daptone in my book. But my focus was on scenes and venues rather than artists, and as Perna noted when we spoke, “there wasn't really a scene for [Antibalas]. There weren't bands playing Afrobeat…It was the same with the Dap-Kings too; there wasn't a soul scene to speak of.” It certainly felt that way at the time - Antibalas seemed liked the totality of New York’s Afrobeat scene, and Daptone’s retro soul aesthetic was so honed and self-contained that its artists seemed to emerge from some other place and time.
Still, when I met Perna a few months ago, I immediately knew that I wanted to interview him and get a clearer picture of how his musical community functioned in the city - especially Williamsburg, the neighborhood he called home for several pivotal years. These days he is working in Oakland, Califonia, making solo music as Martez, co-creating performance art works with his partner Courtney Desiree Morris, preparing the forthcoming Antibalas double album, working in the studio with Lateef the Truthspeaker (Blackalicious, Latyrx) and Toro y Moi, and Sulah Jordan a project with Mark Speer of Khruangbin and co-founder of Keys to the City, a collective that uses a vintage keyboard collection to activate non-traditional spaces with music in the Bay Area. We spoke over Zoom on Valentine’s Day.
You came to New York to go to NYU, right?
I transferred to NYU in August of ‘94, as a second year student. I was in a dorm for about six weeks, [because] they had over-promised housing to way more students [than they could give it to]. I was in Third North, which is that big dorm on 3rd between 10th and 11th. Even though it was a dorm, it was right on the cusp of the East Village. I was writing and reading a lot of poetry and going to open things at St. Mark's Church in the Bowery. The city just felt really open with possibilities.
But a lot of things were changing right when I got there. [It was] the end of David Dinkins[’ term]; Giuliani got elected. There were major rent control rollbacks that first year - I got there just at the time when the needle flipped from, “landlords really need tenants,” to, “tenants really need apartments.” It was still cheap in Alphabet City, but it wasn't like you could barely work, or you could collect cans and pay the rent.
And you met Gabe Roth at NYU.
Gabe and I were roommates [for] a couple stints in college. The first time, he was in a band called Dynomatic; that was a funk group that was kind of like Average White Band, Kool and the Gang, mid-’70s funk. Really good, but different than the soul stuff that happened later. Gabe was in a music tech program and was recording a cover of “My Sisters and Brothers” by Dyke and the Blazers, which has two tenor [saxophone]s. There was one tenor in the group, but he needed a second tenor, so he was like, “Can you come in and record?” I had never been in a recording studio before. That was the first time we worked together.
That summer, we became roommates. We lived one building over from Russ and Daughters, above an Army Navy shop that later became a streetwear store called Burkina. It was a really sketchy building, and we were the newest and youngest tenants. That was still at a time where there was a lot of street heroin use and sex work [on the Lower East Side]. We lived on the top floor, and on any given day there would be needles and rubbers in the hallway, and the lock to the street was busted. But it did feel like it was changing, because right around the corner, Ludlow Street was really popping, the bars, and the alt-comedy scene was really getting off the ground. It was a very vibrant place to be. We were there for like nine months, for our last year at NYU.
[Gabe] wanted to put a band together to play soul music, so we put up flyers and pounded the pavement just trying to find people. We put this thing together that would become the Soul Providers, which was the precursor to the Dap-Kings.
There was a third guy named Mike Wagner who went to NYU with us; he was a trombonist and a guitarist, and he was excellent, like one of the best musicians ever. We were all into collecting these funk reissue albums, of which there weren't that many. But there was a label called Pure, and their return address was on West 86th Street in Manhattan. So [Gabe and Mike] for weeks are like, “Should we go up? Oh my god, is that a real place?”
They just went up and knocked on the door; I forget why I couldn't go with them. But they came back and were like “Yo, we met the dude from Pure! He plays drums, and he studied with Zigaboo from the Meters and these drummers from Fela Kuti’s band!”
That was the beginning of Desco [Records]. Philippe [Lehman, the drummer in question] was super opinionated about what sounded good, what was funky, what wasn't. He was like 12 years older than us, and he also had money, so I think his tastes really dictated [how the music sounded]; like, “This has to sound gritty to the point of [being] bad.” He just had all these wild ideas. He was a record dealer; Pete Rock would be over at his place buying beats, and he was shipping to people in Europe and trading with the 1% of rare groove [collectors]. He’d go to Cleveland for two weeks with a little Fisher Price battery-powered [record player] and just spend weeks in a warehouse listening to thousands of records.
The first record that we did on Desco was a fake movie soundtrack called The Revenge of Mr. Mopoji. Philip was really of the opinion that it had to be a fake reissue because nobody would take a funk record made in 1996 seriously, because no one played funk like that anymore. If you were to say “funk” to somebody, they’d think [of] Cameo, P-Funk, Jamiroquai, Brand New Heavies, Deee-lite…not to shit on any of those bands, but it was just a very, very different kind of aesthetic.
We recorded it at a studio under Max Fish that belonged to this Venezuelan dude named Ray Lugo, who was an interesting character from the LES hardcore scene. We sent some copies to Europe, but we took it [around] to all the East Village shops. That's the first time that I saw the kind of bullshit like, there were people where we would bring up Mr. Mopoji and they were like, “Oh yeah, I have the original of this. I remember when this came out, I saw it on 42nd Street.”
Each record [on Desco] was different. There was Nino Nardini, which was kind of a send-up of Italian and French funky film library music. Ravi Harris and the Prophets, that was another fictional record: Gabe was playing sitar, but we did all these James Brown and Meters songs; the story was that this was this long-lost record of this white dude who went to India, took LSD, came back, and made this record on LSD. There was the Daktaris record, which was some African musicians that Philippe had studied with, most notably JoJo Kuo, who was a drummer from Fela’s band and Manu Dibango, and we wanted to make this Afro-funk/Afrobeat record. We did and I was like, “Whoa, I like the soul and funk stuff, but I really liked this. This is really fresh!” We finished it but we sat on it for a year, but the whole time I was like, I want to be doing this flavor of music.
I want to say around 2000 or 2001, things kind of came to a head between Gabe and Philippe, because Philippe was the drummer for the Soul Providers but he was independently wealthy. The truth was he was not really down and didn't really like performing that much. Gabe would be really trying to push this thing forward, trying to aggressively book gigs and stuff, and then Philippe would be like, “Nah, I'm going surfing in the Dominican Republic, I can't do it.” For Gabe it was a livelihood and for Philippe it was a hobby, and you can't really run a record label for too long with those divergent things.
They ended up splitting, and Philippe started Soul Fire and Gabe and Neil Sugarman, who’d come on to Desco as an artist, started Daptone. And then Gabe brought in Homer Steinweiss from the Mighty Imperials. That was a whole other thing - Nick Movshon, Leon Michaels, Sean Solomon, and Homer Steinweiss sent a tape up to Desco. We didn't know what it was, put it in, and then we found out that it was these 16-year-old kids from the Village. We were like, “Fuck man, these kids sound like the Meters!” So that became the first wave of people younger than us, bringing them into the squad.
And then Dap-Kings were born, Daptone was born, and we did some singles with Sharon [Jones]. And then we started recording the album Dap Dippin’, which was in the can for a while, and then came out in ‘01. We were gigging every other month or every six weeks in the Village, Brownies, the Pyramid Club - which is where that shot was taken on the cover of Dap Dippin’ - and a couple other places. It wasn't that hard to get the bookings, but there were no guarantees. Mostly [the audience] was just our friends, and we could count on a few other funk and soul heads.
I had to leave the Dap-Kings before any really big opportunities started, because as the founder of Antibalas, it got to a point where neither band could become a full-time touring entity without its own personnel. It wasn't a calculated [thing] - I started Antibalas, so I can't really quit it. But Antibalas had as much momentum, if not more. We [got] a bunch of coverage, and our first record was self-released [before] Ninja Tune picked it up. The guys from Ninja were shopping at Other Music, saw our self-released thing, and then called me a few days later, like, “Hey, we want to put this out.” Ninja Tune was a good platform to get our music out to the world, but again, it wasn't like anything else that was on the label.
But we continued to make music together - our manager, Alex Kadvan, we ended up putting him on to managing Sharon, and then the Budos Band and Charles Bradley. And lots of musicians play on different things, like if they want a horn section…there's always like people dipping back across those lines over the years. So in a certain way, we're always very close.
And then on the other hand, it's like, be careful what you wish for, because once you become a touring band, you never see your friends again. You just dip into town and collect your mail and change your underwear and do whatever, and then you're back out again. So from 2004 on, it very much was like ships passing in the night with them. We came back together in 2014 for the Super Soul Revue. But in ‘05, I moved to Texas, and then in ‘08 Gabe moved back to California, so our physical presence as far as people that were gluing the scene together became something else.
Do you remember the first time you went to Williamsburg?
The first time I went out there, it was probably [when] I met this girl at a party by Columbia. She lived in Williamsburg in this [space] on Union, down the street from Kellogg’s [Diner]; the previous owners were a Puerto Rican biker gang. It was either then or Thanksgiving of ‘94, when my friend’s uncle who lived in Greenpoint gave us a ride back down to Philly to be with our families for Thanksgiving. I remember taking the L train out to Bedford Avenue, and walking down Bedford, it was like [mimics the flute riff from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly]. It felt super frozen in time.
You could also feel that it was very segregated between the Polish folks on the north side, the Italians on the north and east side, the Puerto Rican and Dominican folks, and Hassidim. It was those five populations, and then all of these old industrial buildings, and there were a handful of artists living there.
But other than underground parties, there wasn’t much of a draw. I think about that a lot with gentrification, because, yeah, we were definitely part of it, but we weren't displacing anyone - nobody had lived in the first bunch of places we lived in. They weren't residential, they were industrial, so we weren't taking up space in a way that was driving up somebody else's rent.
There were a lot of non-commercial venues, like the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center, which was that old Farmers Bank on the south side of the Williamsburg Bridge. This Japanese woman bought it in the late ‘70s, and would do art shows and music shows very sporadically through the early and mid-’90s. And then there was this loft that me, Tunde [Adebimpe], and Gabe Roth lived at at 132 Havemeyer. We had 1,800 square feet, and we would throw some shows there, including the one that got us kicked out of that apartment.
You knew Tunde from NYU too, right?
Yeah, he was my first friend there. I was trying to start this student group called the Dog Fancy Society, not because I liked dogs, but at NYU, if you wanted to start a student group, you just had to get the names and student ID numbers of 12 other people and present it to the student activities and be like, “Hey, we want to start a group,” and then they would give you office space and a budget. I needed to collect names, and Tunde was over visiting my dorm mates. We just instantly had a [connection] because of our love of the absurdity. He wasn't doing music that much in college, performing or writing, but I had musical stuff around, and Gabe was around and he had a four-track.
We were subletting [on Havemeyer] from this guy named Napoleon Hernandez. He was just a cool Dominican who was one of the few people who was like, “Oh, I see how I can position myself so that I don't get washed away by gentrification.” I think Tunde knew him somehow; Tunde was the coolest with him. He sublet us the whole floor, and he had some friends who put up some walls, but it was not renovated by any stretch.
The downstairs neighbor, who was renting directly from the landlord, was always complaining about us, and we're like, “Why did you move to an industrial building, if you're going to complain about noise?” Every morning at 5:00 am, the C Town grocery delivery trucks were backing up - we could be church mice and it would still be loud as fuck.
What was the show that got you kicked out?
It was Antibalas, Dap-Kings, and a band called The Studs that was our loftmate Jonah's hardcore band - they had a samurai sword and just like, chopped a whole bunch of stuff up. It was noisy, and we got into shit with the neighbors. So Tunde was allowed to stay, but everyone else had to go.1
That was spring of ‘98; it was just a year that we were there. The winter of ‘97 was brutal, because we had plywood over half of the windows, and it was so leaky. It wasn't fixed up at all; the floors were still totally splintery from whatever the last industrial use was. But it was just really cool to be living in a place where everybody was constantly making stuff and hungry. It's one of those things where, if I knew how much work it would take, I probably wouldn't have done it. But [I loved] living in a loft where other people weren't killing themselves at 9-to-5s and everyone was like, “Okay, if you're willing to try, I'm willing to try.”
That's the thing that's just so weird about going to Williamsburg now, because I remember a time when I didn't know everybody by name, but I knew everybody by face because there weren't a lot of people coming in and out of the neighborhood. On the subway platform in the morning, there weren't a lot of people who had jobs in the city, so it might be like seven or eight people on the platform, and you’d look at them like, “You got a job in the city?? What are you doing living out here?”
And then at a certain point, there were these new watershed businesses. There were certain things that appeared and certain things that disappeared. Like, the weed spots disappeared - [they] were little bodegas that had a few legitimate goods on the shelf, [but] they were moving nickel bags. Or botanicas, spiritual supply centers that serve mostly Latino and Afro-Latino populations. But, a cheese shop - I like cheese, but I don't want to see a fucking cheese shop in my neighborhood right now. This means that there's a whole bunch of people who have special cheese money that are coming in, and I'm not a special cheese money person, and neither were there people that were here ten years before me.
Was your musical life still mostly centered in Manhattan?
It was a little bit of both. When I started Antibalas in ‘98, probably ten or so of the fourteen guys lived within walking or biking distance [in] Greenpoint, East Williamsburg, South Williamsburg, Fort Greene. I think [keyboardist] Victor Axelrod lived down in Park Slope or Gowanus; he was the furthest person. So it did really feel like a neighborhood band. But gig wise, yeah, we were playing way more in Manhattan, or if it was in Brooklyn it was a loft, or the El Puente Community Center. We were still largely [gigging around the] Lower East Side, although there was a Latin American community center called Taller Latino Americano at 106th and Broadway [where we would play].
But it was really open, because there wasn't really a scene for us. There weren't bands playing Afrobeat. There were African bands from the continent that would rock a “world music” night or some spot like Kilimanjaro on Lower Broadway or S.O.B.’s, but we didn't really fit into that. It was the same with the Dap-Kings too; there wasn't a soul scene to speak of.
Is there a specific moment that you noticed in Williamsburg where it felt like the tide was beginning to turn?
In ‘99, 2000, I [was] teaching at El Puente Academy right on the corner of South 4th and Roebling. It was this social justice public high school that was crammed into a church that had been squatted in and taken over by Puerto Rican community activists who were connected to the Young Lords and some liberation theologists. We were supposed to move down the block to this five story industrial building. Blueprints were laid out, they had entered into a purchase agreement. The building had been vacant for forever. And then somehow, the owners managed to back out of that sales agreement to El Puente and sell it to a developer to develop into condos. I was like, oh wow, shit is happening.
Part of that was [that] Lower Manhattan was getting really expensive. In the same way that people from the Village, once that got saturated, they moved to the East Village, and once the East Village got saturated, they moved to Alphabet City, and then it all just kind of became this one big Downtown that's a [mix of] wealthy [and] poor, but if you're just landing there, it's not cheap anymore. There was kind of a pause after September 11th, with the city mourning and grieving, putting itself back together. And then it really felt like it accelerated after that.
The [Williamsburg] waterfront, which was like the spiritual autonomous home of the wilds of Williamsburg - when that got redeveloped, that was, for me, the end of our last wild space. There was a big concert that TV on the Radio and some other bands did to protest that rezoning, but it didn't [work], and that was it. [The new waterfront condos] blocked the view, they changed the light - they literally cut off the amount of light that comes into the neighborhood in the afternoons.
And then there were all these other things, like Stay Gold Studio, which was [TV on the Radio producer] Dave Sitek’s studio - it's that fucking J. Crew now. And there were certain characters and things that you're like, “You've been here for forever, and I can't ever see this neighborhood existing without you,” but bang - if you're not generating capital, you don't belong here. Like, if we can capitalize and make one square foot of this neighborhood seem commercially exploitable, then we can [do it to] the whole fucking thing.
I think the last time I was there was in November, we did two shows at Brooklyn Bowl. That neighborhood is so weird, because it's like [how] you get used to somebody 's face, and then they get a facelift. And you're like, “Oh, okay, that's different, but I can get used to it.” And then they get another face lift, and you're like, “…Barbara?? You have the same name, but your nose is in a totally different place!”
I feel like that - I'm like, what the fuck corner am I on? I have to look for a street sign to [recognize] places that I knew like the back of my hand, you know? It's really kind of alienating to go back. There's other places that I much prefer to visit, because they haven't changed so radically and so cynically.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity, brevity, and context.
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Learn more about Martín here
Learn more about Antibalas here and follow them on Instagram
You can order my book This Must Be the Place here (but you’ve already done that, right?)
TV on the Radio’s debut EP, 2003’s Young Liars, was recorded in that loft.
This is so excellent! Tunde's connection to Martin and Gabe is completely new to me, even though I feel like I was there every step of the way - was going to Antibalas shows in '99/2000 (put them into the Fela New Museum exhibit's music program) and lived at TV on the Radio's Luxxx residency in '03. Great Pull!