We Are The DNA of New York

Before Hashtags and TED Talks...

I was the DNA of Brooklyn before it got an undercut haircut and handlebar mustache. Before it became a brand with a tagline, before PR firms in SoHo started pitching Bed-Stuy as “up-and-coming” with the same dead fish-eyed optimism they used to sell oat milk and digital detoxes. Before The Great Pickle War erupted (when a worker stole Gus’s recipe!) and before something so organic as that Grand and Delancey battle transmuted into this current day abomination—a pickle recipe presented as a TED Talk. Before cocaine came with a receipt. It was the New York when you could still get mugged between sets on Loisaida. When you had to throw the keys down from a fire escape in the freezing cold, when jazz lofts hummed above bodegas and attendee’s of CBGB’s bathroom could file for poison gas war crimes. Before “Fuck You” went from a term of endearment to a microaggression. New York didn’t apologize then. It pulsed. It groaned and farted. It sweated through the walls and sang under your feet. If you knew how to listen, the city told you everything.

This isn’t nostalgia. It’s not a Facebook post, not an insta humble-brag or a whiney lament about how “live music is dead” and “kids today don’t get it” (though let’s be honest, part of me is that guy). Every generation thinks they caught the last ferry before the culture died. We thought we were the shit, and the generation before us thought they were. Just like the guys before me swore by Sonny Rollins at the Five Spot or… going all the way back to that night in 1860 when Lincoln spoke at Cooper Union on Eighth Street—yeah, that Lincoln—and closed the deal on capturing the White House. Everyone’s got a “you had to be there” story. Mine just happened to be scored by Wayne Shorter.

For me, this story starts with Weather Report. I was fourteen, an age I seem to like writing about. A sponge. My neighbors were five years older and jazz nerds of the highest order. They’d been to Berklee, or were pretending they had, and they came back one summer with this record—blue cover, no hits, just sound. The first Weather Report album. It started with a track called Milky Way, where Wayne Shorter literally blew his soprano into a grand piano while Zawinul fingered the chords without striking the keys. No melody. No beat. Just molecules moving in stereo.

It didn’t matter that it was listing avant-garde. What mattered was that it wasn’t posing. It was reaching. It was spiritual, weird, dangerous, precise. This wasn’t something you danced to. This was something you, the newly initiated, submitted to.

The Masters. The monsters. For a teenager, virtuosity isn’t just impressive—it’s a doorway. In a world spinning out of control, seeing someone command an instrument is proof that chaos can be shaped. Mastery becomes dominion. A way to carve identity, power, and presence from the static.

And as you well know, we didn’t have YouTube tutorials. If you wanted to understand how Elvin Jones got that sound, you had to go to the Village Vanguard and watch—see how his heel floated off the bass drum pedal to summon that extra flicker of gravity. Memorize Tony Williams’ wrists as they rippled in loose, feathery, butane, godlike strokes. That might take months. That was the point. You had to earn it. Miss it once, and you waited a year.

I saw Weather Report maybe six times. Each lineup was a new incarnation. For you these may just be names, but for me; these drummers were the shamans who guided me through the threshold to manhood. From Alphonse Mouzon to Eric Gravatt to Greg Errico to Acuna to Chester Thompson, Omar Hakim to Peter Erskine, Tony Williams, Gadd—each brought a new inflection, a new chapter in that ongoing conversation that stretched back to Bitches Brew and forward into whatever math-jazz algorithm comes next. They were the bridge between analog and digital, between the sacred chaos of Bitches Brew and the sculpted chaos of everything that followed. If you were listening closely, you could feel the tectonic plates shift.

One night, I locked my keys in my recently acquired, used red Opel GT outside 7th Avenue South. Jaco saw me struggling with a coat hanger. “I’m good at this,” he slurred, and like some half-sainted junkie locksmith, he leaned in, applied pressure, and shattered the window.

“Sorry, man,” he said. And vanished into the snowy night like a broken prophet.

That’s the New York I’m talking about. That’s music. That’s life. Magnificent. Brief. A beautiful chaotic mess that no one cleans up because the mess is the magic.

And now? Now the tools are different. You don’t have to hang outside a club in the bone chilling cold to glimpse genius. It’s in your pocket and the algorithm already knows what you like! But does it know what you need?

That’s a different tune entirely.

We were the DNA of something. Not because we were better. But because we listened. And the music—when it was real—listened back.

So what’s the DNA now? What are they becoming, the kids of today with their lines around the block for a pop-up pizzaiolislice, DAWs, TikToks, plugins, and three-second attention spans? If we were the blueprint for that Brooklyn, that New York—what are they the template for? What comes next?

I don’t know. But I hope it costs them something. I hope they have to chase it, burn for it. Because that’s how you know it’s real.

Maybe it’s still being written. Still being born. I remember when Dylan warned: “He not busy being born is busy dying.” I keep that line close. Like a mantra. Like a key that won’t quite open the door, but keeps you trying.

And maybe—if you press your ear against the glass, even now—you’ll hear the echo of that question Tower of Power posed decades ago:

What is hip?

If you’re really hip… will it show?

Maybe not.

Maybe it doesn’t have to.

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This started with a question I asked here: What’s the most New York moment you’ve ever lived? Your answers floored me. This was mine.

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