The legendary venue on Wythe Avenue closed in 2012, but reopened in Los Angeles in 2017. Photo via Wikimedia.
BY GEOFFREY COBB | gcobb91839@aol.com
I have lived in Brooklyn for forty-four years, and someone recently asked me the best
music venue I had ever experienced. I answered without hesitation: Zebulon, the
legendary little club on Wythe Avenue in Williamsburg.
Zebulon was unique in ways that are difficult to separate from the particular moment in
Brooklyn when it existed. Open from 2004 until December 2012, it was created by three
French expatriates—Guillaume Blestel and the brothers Jef and Joce Soubiran—not
primarily as a commercial concert venue, but as a place to present music, film and art
they personally cared about.
Blestel and Jef Soubiran had already worked together in New York’s restaurant world.
They met while working at Jules Bistro, an East Village restaurant known for live jazz,
and in 1998 opened Casimir, a French restaurant in the East Village. Casimir became
an important precursor to Zebulon. Eventually, they decided to concentrate more
directly on what interested them most: music.
Jeff’s brother Joce was the musician of the trio. A tenor saxophonist who had come to
New York in the 1990s and fallen in love with the city’s jazz scene, he took a leading
role in Zebulon’s musical programming. His tastes helped define the place. Zebulon
presented jazz, experimental music, psychedelia, international music, improvisation and
sounds that sometimes seemed to belong to no category at all.
But a list of genres doesn’t explain Zebulon. You had to be there.
The place felt different from any music club I have experienced. There was no cover
charge, and it never felt as though making money was the reason it existed. It was part
café, part neighborhood living room, part experimental laboratory and part musicians'
clubhouse.
Eventually, Zebulon developed such a reputation that you didn’t have to know who was
playing. You simply showed up. One night it might be free jazz, another African music or
psychedelic rock, another an improvised performance that was impossible to
categorize. People didn’t necessarily go to Zebulon to hear bands they already knew.
They went to discover something they didn’t know. They trusted the place. And they
were rarely disappointed.
Zebulon was small, and that was part of its magic. There was very little separation
between musicians and audience. You weren’t watching a performance from the other
end of a large room; you were right there with the musicians. The intimacy changed the
experience of listening.
It also changed the experience of performing. Zebulon wasn’t simply a place where
finished bands came through town to promote finished records. The owners encouraged
works in progress, improvisation and unexpected combinations of musicians. Artists
could take chances there. Drummer Kenny Wollesen remembered the owners as
genuine fans of the musicians they booked, and Zebulon became a place where new
projects could actually develop.
That, I think, was at the center of Zebulon’s magic: trust. The owners trusted musicians
to take risks. Musicians trusted the owners commitment to the music. And audiences
trusted Zebulon enough to walk through the door without knowing what they were going
to hear. That is radically different from a club built around ticket sales and recognizable
headliners.
Though the place never charged a cover when the hat was passed around for the
performers the audience members would often throw in very generous tips, tens and
twenties, sometimes even fifties. This was their way of showing their appreciation for
the excellent music they heard there.
Sharon Van Etten, who went on to become an acclaimed singer-songwriter, has said
that Zebulon was the first venue to give her a residency and let her curate her own
shows. Its welcoming community helped her gain confidence as a performer. Her
experience says something important about the club. Zebulon didn’t just present a
music scene. It gave musicians a place in which a scene could develop.
When Zebulon opened, Wythe Avenue was a very different place. Williamsburg was
rougher, less expensive and considerably less developed. A motorcycle club sat just
down the block. The transformation that would remake the neighborhood was
underway, but the Williamsburg of luxury hotels, expensive condominiums and high-end
retail had not yet arrived.
Places like Zebulon were part of what made Williamsburg culturally desirable. Artists,
musicians, restaurants, bars and small venues created a neighborhood people wanted
to visit and eventually wanted to live in. But as real estate values rose and a wealthier
population arrived, the conditions that had allowed places like Zebulon to exist began to
disappear.
For Zebulon, that conflict became painfully literal: new neighbors complained about the
noise.
Joce Soubiran said the complaints became especially intense during the club’s final two
years. On Halloween in 2012 alone, Zebulon received seven citations, including noise
violations and citations related to people congregating outside. Keeping the venue open
would have required more soundproofing, lower volume and other changes to the way
performances worked. The owners believed those compromises would change the
character of the place itself.
When they announced the closing, they said Williamsburg had changed so much that they could no longer operate Zebulon “in the manner in which it was conceived.” That sentence captures something larger than the closing of a music club.
Zebulon was part of the culture that helped make Williamsburg exciting, but the transformation of
Williamsburg eventually made it difficult for Zebulon to remain what it had been.
The story did not entirely end there. In 2017, Zebulon reopened in Los Angeles, this
time in a former industrial space. The owners even brought the original wooden bar
from Wythe Avenue with them—a physical piece of the old Zebulon and a tribute to
those remarkable years in Brooklyn.
But for those of us who knew the original, there was only one Zebulon.
After the Wythe Avenue club closed, someone wrote three words in French on a wall:
“Zebulon, je t’aime.”
Zebulon, I love you.
I knew exactly what they meant.
Geoffrey Cobb is the author of “Greenpoint Brooklyn’s Forgotten Past.”
