Residents gathered in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park to celebrate the Chinese New Year. Not only did the festivities bring the Chinese-American community together, but it also provided an economic boost for local vendors.

Mural graffiti portrait of Notorious B.I.G. at the 5Pointz Aerosol Art Center in Long Island City. (Bevis Chin / Flickr)

Last year, Sha Stimuli, a 33-year-old Brooklyn rapper, packed up and moved to Atlanta.  He wanted to widen his audience, he says, and the South beckoned. He’s not the only one moving on.

In recent years, there is a growing sense among hip-hop heads that New York, and Brooklyn in particular, is passé. While there are still stars emerging from the borough, the action, the excitement is taking place elsewhere.

“In the last decade, New York has been left behind,” says Sha Stimuli. Although being a Brooklyn rapper may have helped his career ten years ago, today he sees it more as a disadvantage. “Me saying I’m from Brooklyn doesn’t actually help, because there is no novelty there,” he says. “People got bored of Brooklyn and New York.”

But people weren’t always bored of Brooklyn. Hip-hop may have first emerged from the Bronx in the late 1970s, but it is Brooklyn that, for a generation, has been known around the world as the genre’s incubator. Brooklyn, along with the rest of the East Coast, withstood the coming of a rival from the West Coast—and a resulting battle whose intensity escalated into bloodshed, with the murders of Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. More recently, both East and West Coasts have seen the rise of southern hip-hop in such cities as Atlanta and New Orleans, which have produced a sound more focused on the beat than on the political message that made the East Coast’s success.

All the while, the names associated with Brooklyn hip-hop have remained the same—Jay-Z, Notorious B.I.G, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Busta Rythmes, M.O.P.—leading to talk that perhaps after all these years Brooklyn, once so essential in hip-hop’s evolution, has lost its touch.

But has it? As Notorious B.I.G. once rapped, “where Brooklyn at? “

 ***

Wes Jackson, president of Brooklyn Bodega and executive director of The Brooklyn Hip-Hop Festival believes that Brooklyn is still full of talent, but says that some people thought being “made in Brooklyn” was enough. “I think a lot of artists in Brooklyn are resting on their laurels a little too much,” he says, “Some New York artists forgot that you still have to put in work. Just ‘cause you live off the A Train, it don’t mean nothing.”

For Jackson, who was born in the Bronx, New York hip-hop never disappeared.  It’s just that everyplace else caught up with New York. “I think it’s still happening in Brooklyn as much as anywhere else, there is a ton of quality hip-hop artists here. The problem is now there are quality artists everywhere.

Artists like Sha Stimuli who have moved away say it’s hard to start a career in New York because, in their view, the local media are less than supportive. “The radio stars in New York aren’t from New York,” he says. “If you go to a club, the hottest records aren’t from New York.”

Rapper Donny Goines also made the move from New York this summer. Born in Manhattan, he grew up between the Bronx and Harlem. “Radios don’t play New York rappers,” he says, “and the bosses are going outside to get their talent.” Sha Stimuli still believes radio DJs have the power to make a rappers career. “Radio DJs can change things,” he says, “They can decide to play New York artists and show that New York is still a relevant force.”

For others, blaming that lack of support and airtime is often used as an excuse. “Mainstream radio, media and the major blogs have a tendency to look down or not support some of the artists from New York, that’s true,” says Manny Faces, founder and editor-In-chief of Birthplace Magazine, an online publication that focuses on New York hip-hop. “But let me also say that some of the artists use that as a an escape, as a cop-out. If you’re not making it but you’re from New York, is it because radio and media doesn’t support you? That may be part of it, but maybe it’s also because it’s not that appealing for the rest of the country.”

And with the rise of social media and YouTube, airtime and press clippings seem out of date as the chief marketing weapons. With websites like KickStarter, a fundraising platform for creative projects,  record deals don’t seem as essential to success as they used to be. “The music industry is changing,” says Manny Faces, “and probably across the board not just in hip-hop—it is becoming a little more indie friendly.  You see it with artists like Mac Miller from Pittsburgh, who just sold 150,000 records in his first week with no label!” Donny Goines, for example, has a direct distribution deal with iTunes. He released his latest album, Success Served Cold, in November without the help of a label, but with the support of sponsorships by big clothing brands such as Rocawear and Artful Dodger. While the Internet has opened up many avenues for undiscovered artists it has also vastly widened the market.

Wes Jackson of the Brooklyn Hip-Hop Festival sees a danger in this. He compares hip-hop to a young growing plant. “You want the plant to grow,” he says. “But you still have to prune it and cut the weeds out. You still want growth, lack of growth is death. The danger is that the weeds will strangle you and your death will be your own success.”

***

Corey Smyth, who grew up on 125^th Street and St Nicholas Avenue in Harlem and is now a key figure in New York’s Hip-Hop world believes that location is playing an ever decreasing role in Hip-Hop success. Smyth, founder of Blacksmith Management, Blacksmith Music Corp., and Blacksmith Corporation among other companies—he has worked with De La Soul, Mos Def and Talib Kweli, whom he still manages—says that being a New York rapper is no longer sufficient to attract record labels.

“An area doesn’t make you bankable,” he says. “Being from L.A, New York, Chicago, none of that makes you hot. What makes you hot is that you are. And the way you perceive your surroundings and the way you’re able to regurgitate that back into an art form. That’s what makes you hot. You could be from anywhere.”

Still, hip-hop retains a certain regionalism—one that is no longer limited to the coasts, as Sha Stimuli and Donny Goines have discovered.

“Other regions of the country rose to prominence,” says Manny Faces, “When Cash Money first started the New Orleans thing, they were doing their thing locally and selling lots of records and mixtapes. When the music business figured this out, and when Wendy Day got Cash Money their $30 million distribution deal, then it swiveled. The music business flooded, and they all turned their heads and started signing people.”

Is that just the natural evolution of a music genre that is barely 40-years-old? Probably, says Manny Faces: “Hip-hop being such a expressive form, where you’re not blindly following a formula. It has to evolve to the point where it means different things to different people.”

***

So how did the South emerge as a strong voice in hip-hop? Arguably, one of the first southern hip-hop acts to make a difference was Outkast. “They were hot, for southern rappers,” says Sha Stimuli. “That was the way we were trained to think. When they came out, we didn’t dissect them as people who could take the crown.” A decade later southern hip-hop is topping the charts with artists like Lil’ Wayne, Rick Ross, Young Jeezy… “It’s been 10 years that southern rappers are spitting fire, it’s not a novelty anymore,” he says, “but it has never penetrated New York the way it has now.”

If southern rappers are sending out messages, the meaning may not be the same and the overall sound is different. It makes the rhythm resonate in your rib cage, it sounds greasier, grimmer. New York hip-hop has the mind going in a hundred different directions to understand the meaning of the lyrics. It makes you try and dissect the meaning behind the rhyme, like poetry.  In Decoded, Jay-Z’s autobiography, he says the first reason for writing the book was to make the case that hip-hop lyrics were poetry if you looked at them closely enough.

***

Rappers are not the only artists to be moving to Atlanta; the city has become a hotspot for black entertainment. And there is a wider migration movement that has occurred in the last 10 years. From 2000 to 2010, according to a study by the Bookings Institute based on the 2010 Census, three quarters of the nation’s black population gain occurred in the South, while the black population saw a drop in northern metropolitan areas. Where even ten years ago Blacks were migrating to the North, there are moving back down to the South. With them, the entertainment industry is flourishing in the big cities Dallas or Houston, and especially Atlanta.

Donny Goines didn’t rush into his decision of moving to Atlanta. He wanted to stay in New York.

“I tried to be my hometown hero,” he says, “but I felt limited because overall, a lot of other artists are bitter and jealous of each other, they’re not working together.” After trying to be a rapper in New York, he gave up. “It became redundant and an exercise of futility,” he says, “I left to become strong and represent my city. I’m still rapping like a New Yorker.”  A few months in and there are no regrets. “This is the best career move I’ve made,” he says. Eventually, he plans to return to his hometown. He wants to make enough money to be able to donate half of his earnings to the charity he supports, as well as live in comfort, hopefully in “a nice artist’s loft” back in New York. He hopes to change the image he believes New Yorker rappers have, of not being profitable. “There is a negative connotation in being a New York Hip-Hop artist,” he says, “I want to prove people wrong.”

Still, even with the rise of southern hip-hop, New York remains a force, in good measure because of its history. In 2010, Joshua Atesh Litle directed the documentary, The Furious Force of Rhymes, for which he traveled around the world to meet hip-hop artists “New York City was the complete inspiration,” he says. “Some of the major artists who inspired these artists were Wu Tang Clan, Mob Deep, Jay-Z and Public Enemy.” All from New York.

Brooklyn rapper Sha Stimuli recently moved to Atlanta for his career.

For Sha Stimuli, fans still connect with the New York sound of the early 1990s, that of positive-minded groups like De La Soul or a Tribe Called Quest with their Afrocentric themes, although addressing society’s issues—the pioneers of conscious hip-hop. “There are still people out there who love that sound,” he says. “New York rap is still loved and adored.” In fact this year, Q-Tip, the leader of the 1990s iconic group A Tribe Called Quest filled his concert at the 2011 Brooklyn Hip-Hop Festival.

But New York’s endurance is not only a matter of celebrating the past. Corey Smyth is working on Talib Kweli’s new album. A young girl from Harlem, Azeaila Banks was everywhere on the web with her song 212. And of course there is ASAP Rocky. “New York always has a moment,” says Smyth. “It may not saturate the world but there is always something out. There’s always something poppin’. And if it ain’t poppin’ today, it’ll be poppin’ tomorrow.”

In fact, this year, Harlem-born rapper ASAP Rocky achieved what Sha Stimuli or Donny Goines could not: his first album—Live Love ASAP—was played on New York radio stations. He was even taken on board by Canadian superstar rapper Drake for his next tour.  But there is something else that differentiates him from other New York rappers. He prides himself in not sounding like a New Yorker. “I don’t even like New York rappers,” he told The New York Times.

And he really doesn’t sound like them. With a slower, mushy sound, ASAP Rocky has the flow of a Southern rapper. Sha Stimuli was even surprised to find out he was from his hometown. “When I first heard him,” he says, “I thought he was from Houston!” ASAP Rocky has become a topic of conversation among Hip-Hop heads as an example of how hip-hop has widened its fan base.

“ASAP Rocky has a $3 million dollar deal even though he’s from Harlem but sounds like he’s from Houston,” says Manny Faces, who adds that ASAP Rocky proves his point that there can be local support, but only where there is talent.

***

“New Yorkers have never stopped trying to make music, and there has always been an underground scene here,” he says. “I think in recent years, it has even become more thriving. So the relevance, in terms of the business and media, is actually something very progressive and brewing.” His work, with Birthplace Magazine, is aimed at demonstrating that New York is, in fact, still relevant. “We write exclusively about New York hip-hop, to the general music world, and for the general audience, New York hasn’t had the perceived relevance as it used to have.” Birthplace regularly publishes a column called “5 Reasons Why New York Hip-Hop Doesn’t Suck.”

“New York is still very much on the cusp of what’s hot, what’s fashionable, what’s cutting edge because that’s just New York,” Smyth says. “Being a New Yorker in hip-hop is a privilege. It’s helped define me to a large degree. It’s afforded me insight that you couldn’t have gotten unless you were in New York at the time.” Having studied at Morehouse College, Smyth, too, lived in Atlanta. But, he adds, he never really left New York. “Leaving? You can move, but you can’t leave it. It’s too much to leave. It’s in you.”

***

MORE ON HIP-HOP:

- Growing up with hip-hop: a short documentary.

***

Bah Black, 15, a young rapper from Bushwick (Hannah Olivennes / The Brooklyn Ink)

A mini-documentary about hip-hop in Brooklyn’s projects.

Brooklyn has been a birthplace for hip-hop since the very beginning. More importantly, its housing developments are some of the most well-known incubators of hip-hop talent in the world. Artists like Jay-Z, Notorious B.I.G., and Mos Def, all found their voice through their childhood in Brooklyn’s projects. We followed children, teenagers and adults and asked them how hip-hop influenced their lives, and how their lives influenced their hip-hop.

A collaboration between Hannah Olivennes from The Brooklyn Ink and Nic Stone of NYC in Focus.

***

MORE ON HIP-HOP:

- Where Brooklyn At? Hip-hop’s travelling geographical center. 

***

Jonathan Tayler / The Brooklyn Ink

In the growing darkness, they arrive, individuals at first and then in packs of two and three and then in a stream that seems to have no end. Down this desolate stretch of Kent Avenue in Williamsburg, in the shadow of the abandoned Domino Sugar factory, past the car repair shops and vacant lots, in the shadows created by bare streetlamps and the headlights of livery cabs, they come. Through the open door, passing the discarded cigarette butts and the shoddily put together wooden bench on the sidewalk, they file into GlassLands Gallery to see seven bands play all night.

This could be any night in Brooklyn. This could be any Friday night on Kent Avenue. These could be any bands at any show with any crowd, interchangeable in the Williamsburg and Greenpoint that see thousands of bands a year strive for some kind of fame. But this is a Friday night during the 2011 CMJ Music Marathon, and though it feels no different from any other autumn evening on Kent Avenue or Bedford Avenue or North Sixth Street, the major players—small as they are—feel something different in the air.

“If your band can’t stick out in this sea, they won’t make it,” Hunter Giles says, his band having just dipped themselves into the waters to float in the current. That band, Ava Luna, just finished the opening set of Friday night’s Yours Truly CMJ showcase inside GlassLands, pushing through a 30-minute set with a muscular combo of bass, keyboards and four vocalists. Giles is outside GlassLands, cigarette in one hand and a copy of an Ava Luna album on vinyl in the other. He wears a tweed blazer despite the falling temperatures. This is Ava Luna’s first CMJ show.

There are well over a hundred bands at CMJ, and finding exposure amidst the groups that are piling up buzz and the bigger names that suck the oxygen out of a venue can be a nightmarish proposition. But Giles, who describes himself as Ava Luna’s manager, isn’t scared.

“These are the kinds of festivals people come to looking to find new bands,” he says. “It’s not like Tuesday night shows during a regular week. [CMJ shows] are geared on new music and smaller bands. The audiences know that.”

What the audience knows at GlassLands is beer and liquor. The music plays on in the background, and Ava Luna, by virtue of being first, gets an audience that pays attention to the music before turning to the bar. The second band, a Prince-worshipping group named INC, has a harder time getting the crowd’s attention. By then, conversations have broken out in earnest. People keep flooding in, drawn by the free admission and by knowing someone who knows someone who knows that this band could be big or at least a good way to kill half an hour. The bar is a magnet despite its precarious position on a ledge hanging over the floor, a position that forces drinkers to maintain perfect balance with drinks in each hand as they are jostled and pushed by those behind and below. The crowd seems to regenerate on its own, as if every person who walks in spawns two new people just by entering.

I can’t hear the person next to me, and I suppose they can’t hear each other either. Despite the packed house, I find myself shivering. It was hot earlier but there’s a breeze coming from somewhere. It’s probably the venue door, propped open now to support the constant influx, bouncer harried by the people, girl at the ostensible ticket table no longer paying attention to anyone as they walk in. After all, it’s free. Why keep track?

Outside, in the chill of late October, there is smoking and laughing and a girl in a leopard-print jacket talking to someone on her rhinestone-encrusted iPhone, asking if they had puked this morning. Whatever response she gets elicits laughter. The bouncer, still harried, keeps urging people to move down the sidewalk and make room. Few people listen.

Back on Bedford Avenue, the main strip in Williamsburg, a smaller crowd gathers outside the smaller venue that is Spike Hill, smoking and laughing but with no questions about who has puked recently. Spike Hill’s CMJ showcase, this one hosted by Baeble Music, is also free but less crowded. Nonetheless, it takes all of ten seconds for someone to run into me bodily, shoulders first, once I step in.

Jonathan Tayler / The Brooklyn Ink

The band on stage is unknown to me and probably to everyone else. This is how CMJ operates. You won’t know the band’s name right away, and maybe not even until their last song, when they remind you to come check them out at another showcase on another night at another venue. Maybe you’ll never know their name at all. I learn the band’s name—Jonquil, a four-piece out of Oxford, the English college town —thanks to a chance glance at a beat-up brown leather guitar case propped against the wall by the stage.

The case is held together by duct tape and bears the band’s name in blue masking tape on the front. Jonquil’s gear sits in ragged packs by the side of the stage, to make it that much easier for the members of the band to clear the space post-haste once their 30-to-45-minute set has come to an end. That’s the essence of CMJ: Speed. You have to clear the stage quickly, move to the next venue quickly, press the flesh as fast as you can and impress as many people as you can in just 30 minutes, about six or seven songs. The city’s rhythms perfectly match the hellish pace of the so-called music marathon.

Hugo Manuel is the affable lead singer of Jonquil, a pale man with a round face, thin beard and light blonde hair who is breaking down his keyboard about 30 seconds after thanking the audience for coming out to see them. We talk outside about an hour or so after their set, Hugo having initially left the venue to get a coffee and then to a nearby bar with the rest of his bandmates to do an interview for some music promotional group or another. This is Jonquil’s first CMJ show but they’ve been to New York before, supporting a number of bands as openers. The people who went to those shows knew what to expect, but Hugo believes that the people at this showcase had no idea what they were going to see. That’s what he loves most.

“What’s exciting is knowing that the people you’re playing shows to are people who have never heard you before,” he says.

He and Jonquil have done the festival circuit before—most notably South by Southwest, the giant Austin, Tex., showcase in the spring—but all four members prefer CMJ to SXSW.

“CMJ is like New York but with more bands,” Hugo says, a tremendously obvious statement that contains a deeper truth. Nothing separates CMJ from New York or Brooklyn. There are just more bands and more free shows and media and record label types who run around looking high and low for the next big thing. But the bands involved feel as if there’s something else there, an energy or desire that regular shows don’t quite reach.

“When CMJ’s going on, no one can think of anything else,” says Sam Scott, Jonquil’s bassist and occasional trumpet player. “It feels like everybody’s ready to give you a chance.”

Another four-person group from England follows Jonquil at Spike Hill. It’s a band that has seen their name begin to trend upward in their homeland despite at least two previous name changes. They’re called Viva Brother and are famous enough to warrant their own Wikipedia page, about seven or eight photographers in front of the stage who snap shots incessantly for the entire set, and a cheering section who may or may not know who Viva Brother is, but you get the sense that the band could care less. They have to go to Rochester in the morning for a show in the evening, according to their lead singer, Leo Newell, who fills in the crowd on their travel arrangements during a break between songs. “Rochester can suck a dick,” he says. “Unless they like us better, in which case New York City can suck a dick.”

Viva Brother is brash and bold on stage, churning out the kind of reliable British rock that has pervaded all music on the island since 1986. The supernovas of British pop—Oasis, Blur, Stone Roses, The Smiths—will all be name-checked in reference to Viva Brother. But they put the past aside, because they are young and full of energy and the occasional Pabst Blue Ribbon, and while they do nothing on the level of spitting on a photographer or head-butting an audience member, they radiate the give-it-your-all-or-screw-it mentality that most bands here could use more of.

On stage, Newell is no holds barred. When I talk to him just after his set, as he drags gear from the stage to the front of the venue, he is unflinchingly polite and soft-spoken. Viva Brother, like Ava Luna and Jonquil, has never played CMJ before. And like the foursome in Jonquil, Newell knows that CMJ and Brooklyn mean something big.

“There’s something special about New York City and in the air,” he says. “You could bump into someone you’d never meet. It’s a different experience and it means you’re being taken seriously on a different level.”

The difference is in the similarity. Nothing in Brooklyn changes during CMJ. Bedford Avenue is still a crowded mess and the bands dragging equipment down the street are a common sight on any weekend. That’s all that matters to these bands.

“These areas in Brooklyn feel like they’d be like this way all the time,” says Jonquil drummer Dom Hand. “It’s the true New York City experience.”

USA Today has a profile on Jane’s Carousel, which opened last month at Brooklyn Bridge Park. Take a virtual spin with their slideshow of photos.

Word, a bookstore in Greenpoint, got the New York Times treatment this weekend. The piece included a lovely photo slideshow of, you guessed it, books. Who knew words were so photogenic.

Did you hit any of the CMJ shows this weekend? If you missed it you might like the photos on Brooklyn Vegan.  Stay tuned for our story on CMJ from Jon Taylor.

JC Ortiz's tattoos incorporate his nautical and musical passions. (Anna Codrea-Rado/The Brooklyn Ink)

For half the year JC Ortiz, 29, works on a fishing boat in Alaska. He spends the other half in Williamsburg, playing the banjo in his band, The Keeps.

Ortiz got his first tattoo three years ago in Chico, CA. He wanted a design that encompassed music as well as fishing. So he drew an anchor on a napkin with the rope in the shape of a treble clef.

When he took the napkin to a tattoo artist, he wasn’t expecting him to copy it straight from his drawing.

As a result, he says it’s a “bad tattoo.” Still he likes it because it reminds him of a “special time” in his life.

JC Ortiz's tattoo has a treble clef wrapped around an anchor, with the New Mexican Zia symbol on the base. (Anna Codrea-Rado/The Brooklyn Ink)

Ortiz’s got his most recent tattoo three months ago and it follows the same musical-nautical theme.

Spending as much time as he does at sea, he has a particular affinity with boats. They’re his home for long stretches of time. He had his tattooed ship’s sails decorated with symbols central in his life: the treble clef, the New Mexican Zia sun and a heart. Ortiz left two sails blank and called it his “heart vessel.”

See more of Brooklyn’s inked

Tim Ryans had a sunflower with Peter Pan sleeping inside tattooed on his chest after he had his heartbroken (Anna Codrea-Rado/The Brooklyn Ink)

Peter Pan sleeps inside a sunflower on the left side of Tim Ryans’ rib cage. Ryans, a musician from Williamsburg, says he got the tattoo – his only one – after his “heart was broken for the first time.” His decision was by no means rash and the concept for a design evolved slowly. Ryans knew he wanted something that incorporated a sunflower – a nickname friends at summer camp used to call him – and his favorite childhood character, Peter Pan.

After Ryans and his girlfriend spilt up, he started to hang around a tattoo parlor in his hometown of Austin, Texas. He befriended one of the artists and told her about his idea; without Ryans even, she drew it out for him. After seeing it visualized, he knew he wanted to go ahead with it. Ryans had the tattoo done the day before he left Austin for California. The move marked a new chapter in his life and the tattoo was a concluding stamp on the previous one.

Ryans had the tattoo placed on his chest because he didn’t want it to be visible. He shows it only to “people who get to know me first.”

Rivera sound checks at the Marine Park Salt Marsh Nature Center on June 4, 2011. (Photo: Robert Fieseler/The Brooklyn Ink)

Ray Rivera, jazz guitarist, singer and songwriter, strolled to the mike at the Brooklyn Marine Island Salt Marsh Nature Center on a hot night this June. The pine box of a park ranger station, occupancy 50, was standing room only.

Rivera looked sharp in a brown, plaid suit. He had no set list. He sized up the audience and dove right in. The first chord reverberated through his Herb Ellis model hollow-body Epiphone guitar.

“I’ve got a crush on you,” he sang, enunciating the lyrics of the Gershwin standard. “I-I-I’ve gotta crush on you-u-u,” he elaborated, his silvery voice spreading.

Through the sticky marsh air, heads grooved to Rivera’s tunes. This concert was his fourth at the Salt Marsh Nature Center since 2010. This series is just the latest evidence that, in its modest and respectable way, Rivera’s career continues into its seventh decade.

“Ray’s guitar playing is pretty basic,” said bassist Dave Moore, 80, who closely collaborated with Rivera in a guitar-bass duo for 10 years. “The chords are always right. But his singing is really fabulous, in that he doesn’t embellish too much, but he has phrasing that is just phenomenal.”

Leading jazz critics and historians are more temperate in their judgment. To National Public Radio producer Howard Mandel, Rivera’s crowd-pleasing style of commercial jazz is “workman-like.” Dan Morgenstern, director of Rutgers University’s Institute of Jazz Studies, said Rivera stood out more as a composer-singer than instrumentalist.

Rivera pauses to chat before a set. (Photo: Robert Fieseler/The Brooklyn Ink)

Indeed, one of Rivera’s biggest songwriting hits, You’ve Been Talkin’ Bout Me Baby, was recorded in 1965 by the Ramsey Lewis Trio for their Grammy Award-winning album The In Crowd. The album peaked at number two on the Billboard 500. Another Rivera hit, Cuchi Frito Man, was featured on Latin-jazz icon Cal Tjader’s 1965 album Soul Burst.

Rivera recorded more than a dozen albums in his career. Their success was niche, even by jazz standards. Rivera’s most critically acclaimed album, the 1980 release Let Me Hear Some Jazz on Insight Records, was nominated for a Grammy Award. Rivera’s best-selling album, 1971’s The Now Sound of the Ray Rivera Orchestra on MGM, showcased performances by well-known friends like Brazilian guitarist Eumir Deodato and Latin conga player Pucho.

“They sound friendly and easy-going, direct, companionable,” said Mandel as he listened to Rivera’s work. “But ‘important?’ I’m afraid no one has invested in his career enough to raise it to the level of recognition to which the term ‘important’ could be applied.” Rivera never tracked on the Billboard charts, never ranked on the yearly Down Beat magazine poll for standout jazz artists.

Yet, Rivera has attracted a cult following among musicians and listeners. Presently, a YouTube clip (http://bit.ly/nhppXr) of Rivera in a guest performance with trumpeter Wynton Marsalis at the House of Tribes Community Theatre on January 7, 2007 has over 17,000 hits. An independent label, Meltdown Records, will soon release a backlog of recordings entitled Rare Masters of Ray Rivera. Rivera’s out-of-print 45-inch records sell on eBay for hundreds of dollars. Taken together, these elements affirm that Rivera, at age 81, is experiencing a late career renaissance.

Many who know Rivera’s music also know his life story. In 2008, he self-published a biography called Ray’s Tune: Music Is My Thing. Walking through the “Wall of Fame” hallway in his two-bedroom, South Brooklyn apartment, Rivera points to photos of himself with Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington and Francis Ford Coppola. Smiling beside each celebrity appears to solidify his status as a star beneath the radar—always on the cusp of making it.

Rivera performs with an ease that betrays none of his upbringing: four years in a foster home, five years at an orphanage, six years in an abusive household with his mother’s boyfriend. “I cast that anger down early on in life,” said Rivera.

At age 14, Rivera said, he was kicked out of his mother’s apartment on 103rd Street in Harlem. He caught pneumonia and almost died at Montefiore Hospital. Alone in the hospital room, Rivera began to hear music around him. “Like floating on a cloud,” he recalled. “Beyond belief, music I’d never heard. And, as I grew up, I said, ‘I wish I could write music like that.’”

Weeks later, Rivera began writing poetry for the first time. “I could write these poems,” he said. “I had a knack for writing lyrics, writing songs. It was just like a natural thing.” Rivera was 15 when left the hospital. Two years later, he’d become a rising star in the New York jazz scene.

Through the late ‘40s, Rivera bounced around as a lead vocalist. When Rivera met clarinetist Frank Gator, Gator was enticed by Rivera’s potential. He slapped an upright bass in Rivera’s hands. Rivera went for it. “I was playing by ear, ‘cause I had good ears,” said Rivera. “I could listen between the notes.”

Throughout the ‘50s, Rivera’s voice won the admiration of jazz greats. Singers Bobby Darin and Billie Holiday came to see Rivera perform at Midtown restaurant Matty’s Town Crest. Rivera recorded with jazz heavyweights Hank Jones and Toots Thielemans. He sang alongside bop vocalist Babs Gonzales, who exclaimed of Rivera’s showmanship, “Damn, Ray, you’re trying to make all the money.”

By the late 1950s, Rivera seemed poised for a breakout. Fresh off a 13-week stint on the WPIX—Channel 11 television show The Spotlight of Values, Rivera recorded with MGM and Decca Records. Performing demos at the Brill Building, a 49th Street hub for the music business, he’d earned his way into the American Society of Composers, Artists & Publishers (ASCAP).

Then, the power center of music shifted. Folk and rock ‘n’ roll achieved market dominance. Major labels like A&M Records (founded in 1962) and Capital Records (ushering in Beatlemania) lured musicians west to Los Angeles. Rivera made the choice to stay in New York City. “I probably could have made it big there,” Rivera insists now, “but I didn’t sign with anybody cause they were out there robbing people.”

Rivera tells a story, with bassist Nick Ara in background. (Photo: Robert Fieseler/The Brooklyn Ink)

In an atmosphere where many artists signed unfavorable contracts or went unpaid for recordings, Rivera’s kneejerk suspicion of managers and major labels kept from him pursuing opportunities. “I’d hear this guy or that guy weren’t paying the artists,” remembered Rivera. “So, I said, ‘Why should I record?’ I said that a lot.” Rivera walked away from projects with Cadillac Records and Charlie Parker Records.

Most of Rivera’s early recordings, such as the single Ho-Dee-Ing-Dong on Decca Records, never developed into future partnerships. Musical relationships would dissolve after one release, usually over terms of pay. “You had your music out there, and you never got paid,” said Rivera. “I’d say something. Next thing you know, they dropped the whole thing.” Rivera’s assertiveness wasn’t always welcome, and he was not a big enough star to impose it.

In 1963, Rivera switched instruments. He walked into the studio of guitarist Kenny Burrell to demonstrate a song, and the only instrument around was Burrell’s own guitar. Rivera inspired Burrell with his style of play: no single notes, all chords. Burrell sent Rivera to guitar teacher Allen Hanlon, who told Rivera, “I’m gonna bring out what you have.”

By the mid ‘60s, Rivera’s songwriting career surpassed his performing career. Writing for jazz, Latin, salsa, country, blues and rock, he became one of the early cross-genre composers. “He was writing for everyone,” said vinyl collector and seller Robert Watlington, 63. “That’s unheard of. Because you generally build up your little dynasty in your own little ghetto.” Composer Claus Ogerman, who recorded with singer Frank Sinatra, began collaborating with Rivera.

Yet, though he received ample work, Rivera collected few royalties. According to Rivera, his biggest selling song, You’ve Been Talkin’ Bout Me Baby, earned him next to nothing. “Someone was interviewing Ramsey Lewis,” said Rivera. “And he said, ‘That album sold over a million copies.’ And I said to myself, ‘I didn’t get paid for a million copies.’”

In 1981, Rivera formally acquired the rights to his songs. He inked a distribution deal with CBS Music Publishing that year and received a $7,500 advance. Through that deal, he continues to earn royalties on his catalog.

On December 1, 2011, Meltdown Records plans to release the career retrospective Rare Masters of Ray Rivera for download on Amazon.com. Rare Masters represents a masterwork of 15 out-of-print or previously unreleased albums. “It’s gonna be a surprise for people,” said Rick Russo, 53, owner of Meltdown Records, “to realize that this incredibly melodic material all comes from one mind.”

Rivera will play his fifth concert at the Salt Marsh Nature Center (http://bit.ly/nLXTSO) on August 20 at 7 p.m. Additionally, he’ll play two sessions at Adobe Blues (http://bit.ly/mORseR), a Staten Island restaurant, on August 27 at 11 p.m. and 1 a.m. Both concerts are free of charge.

Way back at Montefiore Hospital, Rivera heard a proverb that stuck with him. He recites it from memory at many performances: “No star is lost we once have seen. We may have been what we might have been.” He interprets it to mean, “If you believe in something, go for it.”

Maino, whose real name is Jermaine Coleman, got away with a slap on the wrist after cops issued him a desk appearance ticket and allowed him to continue on his way, a far cry from earlier interactions with the law. Maino, 27, spent a decade in prison on kidnapping charges and was let out in 2003.

Students learn mariachi techniques during last week's guitar class. (Caitlin Kasunich/The Brooklyn Ink)

The Brooklyn Music School has served the African-American community in Fort Greene almost exclusively during most of its 98 years in operation. That is changing as more and more Hispanics are moving into the neighborhood.

Executive director Frank Alvarado said he realized soon after he arrived in 2009 that his school, which offers extracurricular music and dance classes to adults and children throughout the week, could not continue to ignore the shifting ethnic makeup of the neighborhood. It came home to him, he said, when five Latino families who had recently moved to Fort Greene came to him and said they felt unhappy and isolated from the rest of the population. They asked him to find a way to bring diversity to the school.

Change came on Aug. 30, when a Manhattan-based cultural group called Mano a Mano: Mexican Culture Without Borders moved to the Brooklyn Music School to launch a new program aimed at integrating Mexican arts and customs into the lives of children, teenagers and adults in the neighborhood. The program, entitled Mexicanidad, allows singers, dancers and musicians of all ages and experience levels to enroll in Mexican cultural classes, such as mariachi trumpet and Son Jarocho strings and dance, which are taught by professional performers.

“Mexicans who are living in New York will feel that their culture is honored,” said Emily Socolov, 58, executive director of Mano a Mano. “They will come here and say, ‘Wow, this is great. Look at all these people who love Mexico and love Mexicans and love Mexican culture and want to promote it and support it.’”

As of Sept. 13, Alvarado, 55, said that 90 percent of the 191 total participants at the school, not including those in the Mexicanidad program, were African-American. But Alvardo said the new program is partly responsible for an influx of Hispanic students: so far, Mexicanidad has already attracted 30 to 40 new participants, almost all of whom are Hispanic, said Luz Aguirre, program manager of Mano a Mano.

U.S. Census statistics also indicate that Brooklyn’s Kings County, which includes Fort Greene, has experienced steady growth in the Hispanic population, from 462,411 in 1990 to 487,878 in 2000. For the past four or five years, Alvarado said, more and more members of the Hispanic community have been re-locating to Fort Greene, for two main reasons: one is the low-income housing in Downtown Brooklyn that makes the neighborhood more affordable than others in the borough, and the other is Fort Greene’s proximity to Sunset Park, which already has a strong Hispanic presence.

As communities change over time, however, cultural tensions between different ethnic groups inevitably arise, said Socolov.

“No spaces are new. This space used to be our space, and now it’s your space,” she said. “There will always be that kind of issue. It has happened in El Barrio, which was always Puerto Rican and somewhat Dominican and is now dominantly Mexican. These changes that happen constantly in our city both create a tension and a sense of ownership. It’s sort of a cyclical process in a sense.”

Eduardo Penaloza, educational programs coordinator at the Mexican Consulate in New York, said programs like Mexicanidad are effective.

“This is a way to bring the communities together,” said Penaloza, 45. “Just open a common space, and let everybody show his own culture, his own thing, his own music, dance and art..”

“These programs are pretty important,” agreed Lisia Leon, 33, a participant in the Tuesday night mariachi guitar class who moved to Park Slope two months ago. “When I first came to New York eight years ago, there weren’t a lot of Mexicans. People are away from their families, and we come from large families. This is something my family has listened to my whole life. I have obviously never played it, so this is a nice way to listen to it and be a part of it at the same time.”

Monica Guevara, Mexicanidad’s dance instructor for the kids’ ballet folkórico, says the program helps bridge ethnic divides. “It provides a forum or a way of interacting with people who aren’t necessarily in your race or ethnicity,” she said “Just being able to have that common ground – that common enjoyment of something like dance or music or art – allows you to explore that together and grow in that way.”

One of Guevara’s students, 5-year-old Emma, came to her first class on Sept. 20. Her father, 41-year-old Jean-Paul Forsans from France, said that he wanted his daughter to participate with the program so that she could connect with her Mexican background, and he had not heard of another program in the city where she could do so.

“My wife speaks Spanish to Emma, and I speak French to her,” he said. “This program is making the link between her Mexican roots and Spanish and the opportunity to practice Spanish outside of the home.”

Registration for Mexicanidad’s first semester began on Aug. 23, and the year-long session will run until June 18, 2011.

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