Soup & Sound 200!
Since 2001, when we moved in, 292 Lefferts Ave. had been a typical Brooklyn railroad apartment: hallway, three rooms, tiny kitchen. I did a lot of practicing, rehearsals, private sessions, and recordings, but it all happened in the basement where there is a small room. Much transcendent music was made down there, but afterwards I regularly felt that it was a shame that the New York music audience couldn’t hear it, and wasn’t even aware of it.
By 2009 we had two kids and Alissa (my wife) said she would really like to open up the space on the main floor. Since I come from an ancestral line of people involved in building construction that goes into the 1600s in the Orkney Islands, it was easy for me to make that happen. At some point after the project was done I realized we now had enough space on the main floor to start inviting audiences to hear the great music that had been going on here for years already.
We did so for the first time on November 22, 2009. Two groups played—a duo of Briggan Krauss and Chris Speed, and trio of Jack Wright, Reuben Radding, and me. I made soup, people brought food and drink to share. I didn’t ask for any money—I thought of it as a party or social gathering, not something commercial.
The music was phenomenal, and after several Soup & Sounds I felt confident that what we were doing was more or less equal in quality to anything being performed in any venue in New York, with certain added virtues—intimacy, excellent homemade food (offered for free!), a non-commercial environment, great appreciation for the artists, a dignified space, opportunity for interaction between artists and audience.
Later people would tell me that the “lived in” quality of the space, with creative kid art on the walls, gave it a feel that they liked. Anyway, the whole first evening was fabulous in every way, and it was clear that this was something I should keep doing. Just cuz it was fun.
Seven months went by and we did another, then three months for the one after that, and by 2011 it had definitely coalesced into “a thing” and we would do them more often.
In the very early days we didn’t publish the address and we didn’t ask for money. By about 2012 that changed. When it became a more regular happening I felt that the musicians should get paid for their amazing work, so we asked for donations. About a year later I started taking a percentage to (partially) cover soup ingredients.
In early 2014 we were given a Steinway grand piano by my mother-in-law, April Schwartz, who also insisted that we fix up the space and make it more presentable. Fixing up the place was worth a Steinway though it meant an end to a particular bohemian vibe with paint peeling off the ceiling, holes in walls, inexplicable stains in plaster, etc. We also got our wildly painted Mexican toilet at this time.
By the 2017-19 years I noticed a change in how Soup & Sound, and I, seemed to be perceived. A group of Finnish musicians told me that after I had done a Soup & Sound with them in 2012 they had been very inspired and started their own Soup & Sound in Helsinki. It lasted for five years until the host moved.
People visiting New York from other parts of the US or abroad would show up at my house. When I went to Argentina, Maine, Germany, New Hampshire… people wanted to do Soup & Sounds. I remember walking into Roulette for a sound check and the drummer Andrew Cyrille (legend and hero to me of course) called from across the stage, smiling: “Soup & Sound!” I had no idea he knew me. We also began co-producing Soup & Sound events with Lincoln Center and the Wrocław, Poland based jazz festival Jazztopad that brought me there to perform at house concerts.
Our tenth year, 2019, was significant too because for the first time Continuum received funding for Soup & Sound. Previously, aside from two occasions, I had not invited anyone to perform—the performers had reached out to me. There were a bunch of artists—my respected elders especially—who I would have loved to invite from day one, but because I couldn’t offer them a fee I didn’t want to insult them by asking them to play for the door.
With funding I started inviting folks. We also started presenting regularly in other locations—in community gardens, libraries, galleries, a church, etc. mainly in historically marginalized neighborhoods in Brooklyn.
The March, 2020 onset of COVID-19 pandemic shut down all gatherings, including live performances, for months. For us it wasn’t until Fall 2022 that we started regularly doing Soup & Sounds in my house, indoors, and open to the public. We had shifted to doing pretty much everything outdoors or on video.
As of June 2024 we are going strong at my house and in multiple locations, my soup making skills are formidable, and along with live performances, we video everything.
Check out our vimeo page.
We look forward to seeing you at the next Soup & Sound!
- Andrew Drury
Toilet Humor. The toilet didn’t arrive for many months after we finished knocking out more walls and re-doing the main space, kitchen, and bathroom. Where was it? We honestly thought we had been ripped off. Then one day, five months after we were done, it arrived! We couldn’t immediately install it, but it looked so nice that we kept it in the middle of our living room floor, functioning as a sculpture or kind of like a coffee table. We get a lot of compliments for our toilet, and at a Soup & Sound in 2023 someone told me “Your toilet made my night!”
The Name Soup & Sound
I don’t know when I started calling it “Soup & Sound” but I realized in the last year that there is actually a very direct and real link, in both name and spirit, to the magnificent “Bread & Puppet Theater” in Vermont. Bread & Puppet is an artist-led institution that happens where a visionary artist/puppeteer/baker/social critic lives. Bread and Puppet manifests a socially rooted vision in which art, food, and community weave together to produce some of the best theater in the US and world, all without links to external funding, publicists, gatekeepers, and many of the other trappings of the Art Industrial Complex.
