| The 250-seat music performance space that is opening tonight in the Melrose section of the Bronx began with a cassette recording that was played at a staff meeting of a nonprofit organization. This was in the early 2000s, when cassette tapes were still a thing.
The tape was a sampling of the musical legacy of the Bronx — music that had been written or performed there. “Everyone’s eyes lit up,” recalled Nancy Biberman, who at the time was the president of the nonprofit, the Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corporation. She remembers telling herself after the meeting that “maybe we are thinking too narrowly about what community development could mean — it’s not just bricks and mortar.” That realization morphed into thinking about what tenants would want besides basic needs like food, health care and education. What would make them happy? WHEDco, as Biberman’s group is known, decided that music was an answer and incorporated the venue that is opening tonight in space adjacent to the Bronx Commons development, which has 305 below-market-rate apartments built on vacant city land that had been set aside for housing. But Bronx Commons was designed with more than housing in mind. There is amphitheater-style seating in two plazas that can be used for outdoor performances. Space was also set aside in the complex for a dance studio, a recording studio and postproduction facilities — and a green room for performers. And there is the new performance space, the Bronx Music Hall. WHEDco says it is the first new independent music venue in the Bronx in more than 50 years. Tonight Biberman, now the president emerita of WHEDco, will moderate a panel discussion about how the music hall evolved. The discussion will be followed by a ribbon-cutting ceremony and performances by the hip-hop artists Grandmaster Cas and MC Sha-Rock, as well as by Uptown Vinyl Supreme, which calls itself a “vinyl DJ collective” that pays homage to the analog roots of music, and by the Afro-Haitian band Kong. “Finally,” said Bobby Sanabria, the Grammy Award-nominated bandleader who is a co-artistic director of the Bronx Music Heritage Center, set up by WHEDco when the Bronx Music Hall was being planned. “I say ‘finally’ because we were delayed because of Covid.” The pandemic hit just after tenants had moved into Bronx Commons and long after the music heritage center had taken up residence in a storefront in another building WHEDco had developed. Sanabria said that when Biberman offered him the co-artistic director post, she asked what he wanted to do. “I said I’d do what Wynton is doing at Jazz at Lincoln Center,” referring to Wynton Marsalis, the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center. “The only difference is to be Bronx-centric. It won’t be just jazz. It will be all forms of music.”
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