The New York collective Standing on the Corner often calls itself an “art ensemble,” a moniker which helps outline its approach to music and performance, while hinting at its creative roots and perspective. With composer, conductor and co-founder Gio Escobar at the center of a constantly rotating band line-up that’s seldom the same for consecutive performances, each of which might feature a radically different concept and repertoire, SOTC moves freely yet decisively between jazz improvisations, dub excursions, garage-noise freak-outs and lo-fi hip-hop collage, giving prescience to Hua Hsu’s observation that its music sounds like “field recordings from a vanishing city.” SOTC’s work is deeply wedded to this sense of place. Since they began operating in 2014, its members, predominantly Black and Caribbean with Escobar emphasizing his Nuyorican heritage, have become key representatives of New York’s new inter-borough musical avant-garde, part of a young creative Blackness vanguard. Just as the collective’s sound is in constant, determined flux, so are the mediums through which it’s presented: SOTC’s four albums-cum-mixtapes, a couple of singles, and occasional short-run films/video installations, are as central to the group’s legend as its concerts and happenings, which can take place in a club or DIY space, at a museum or an art-house theater, each carrying its own specificity of liberative intent. The constant in the group’s vision is a cultivation of changing aesthetics using the mindfulness of hip-hop natives, making historical reappraisals through contemporary lenses, and filtering both via the dignity of local community values. The reason Standing on the Corner has developed a seemingly wide cast of admirers—from underground jazz experimentalists and popular musicians, to gallerists and curators—is the group’s clear illustration of these connections as a constant ingredient in the continuum of African Diasporic music. And a renewal of the idea that the “art ensemble” is the best way to get these ideas over. “Que Viva Puerto Rico Libre!”

This special iteration of the Off the 405 concert series celebrates Working Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop, an exhibition that chronicles the dynamic creative exchange between a collective of photographers that began operating in 1960’s New York City, who fused the energy of jazz and improvisation into their stylistically untethered approach to representing the African American experience.

Read more about Standing on the Corner: “Meet Standing on the Corner, the Post-Genre Crew Whose Music Speaks a Secret Language,” Pitchfork.