Global groove music finds a home in Crown Heights

After a rocky pandemic opening, Wild Birds has taken flight as a haven for musicians and music lovers

Wild Birds is one of many clubs participating in the Brooklyn Magazine Festival later this month. Get more info here; and check out the lineup for our two-day concert lakeside in Prospect Park at LeFrak Center here.

Wayne Tucker and the Bad Mothas performing (Max Kalnitz)

It’s a Monday evening at Wild Birds in Crown Heights and the pianist and singer Akie Bermiss is finishing a set of soulful crooning punctuated by humorous banter. Before he leaves the stage, Wild Birds co-owner Julian Klepper takes the mic, silver bucket in hand, to ask audience members an important question: What is live music worth to them?

“I want us to quickly contextualize what we’re about to do right here because, you should understand, Akie Bermiss has and will play some of the songs that he plays here tonight in front of tens of thousands of people who sometimes pay anywhere between $20 and $40 a ticket,” Klepper tells the audience. “You’re here in this intimate setting, a crowd with 40 people. What is this worth?”

Unlike other venues, Wild Birds, located on the corner of Dean Street and Classon Avenue, has no cover or drink minimum. Instead, there’s a suggested donation of at least $10 per act. Every night, twice per act, either Klepper or co-owner Luke Bonner will deliver a speech unique to the artist, asking audience members to support the years of practice it took for them to end up on the venue’s stage.

On this particular Monday, Klepper—tall, dark-haired, and giving off Jimmy Fallon vibes—walks from table to table, people toss money into the bucket or scan Bermiss’ Venmo code.

To first time visitors, these speeches may seem like a quirky schtick. But they are integral to Wild Bird’s mission to make music of the African diaspora accessible while supporting and spotlighting local musicians.

A musician-first mentality
When Klepper first got the idea for Wild Birds from a friend, he liked the idea of booking live music the way he had always imagined it in his head. A filmmaker by trade, he envisioned a venue similar to a set with attention to detail in lighting, décor, and quality of sound. Musicians were the priority.

Klepper initially hired Bonner to run the venue’s sound but after talking more about the project they realized their values aligned perfectly and became partners.

“It sounded like something that could amount to a life’s purpose,” Bonner recalls. Or at least enough to convince him to fly back to New York from a backpacking trip in Europe to begin looking at locations.

Before construction began, Klepper talked with numerous local musicians to learn what kind of venue they wished they could play at regularly.

One of the first musicians Klepper called, singer and trumpeter Wayne Tucker, told him what sets a good venue apart from a great one is whether or not the quality of music is consistently good every night.

“When the bands are always good somewhere, people want to play at that place,” Tucker says. “It’s almost like a proving ground for like, ‘Okay, are you good enough to play this place?’”

Klepper and Bonner knew they wanted to create a venue of that caliber. They also wanted to feature groove-based music. They felt the city was oversaturated with traditional rock and jazz venues and—partially inspired by Klepper’s Haitian-Jewish heritage—wanted to expose listeners to genres like cumbia or Latin or Afrobeat that they might not listen to at home.

Most importantly, they wanted to pay musicians well. But they didn’t want to corner people into buying tickets for a band they might not know or like. They trusted that if they consistently booked quality acts and didn’t require a cover, people who stopped in would vibe with the music enough to kick in the suggested donation.

‘Survival by any means’
After nearly two years, the duo’s musician-first business model has found a groove. A devout community has formed around the club, with regulars returning to see their favorite bands or to check out a new artist.

But this success didn’t come without its challenges.

Construction began in 2019 with a goal of opening Wild Birds in March 2020 but the duo immediately ran into problems. For starters, neither Klepper nor Bonner had any business experience. They quickly exceeded their original budget and went into debt despite being on location nearly every day to help with construction.

“We fucking lost it during construction because everything was over budget, everything was going wrong because we had no idea what we were doing,” Klepper says. “And then we were like, ‘Fuck yeah, we’re about to make all of our money back in March of 2020.’ And then the fucking pandemic happened.”

Like so many others, they were blindsided. Bonner contracted the virus as did one of their lead contractors, who nearly died.

Unable to open or book live music, Klepper and Bonner sold wine and plants to pay rent. By July 2020 Wild Birds officially “opened” and could host shows outdoors on its large sidewalk. Still, the city only allowed acoustic music, not electric, which restricted the pool of musicians they could book.

“It was survival by any means,” Klepper says. “You had to be creative and you had to be one step ahead of this stuff and you just had to be earnest.”

Survival in the early days of the pandemic was a communal effort. Wild Birds was one of the only places in Crown Heights, or even Brooklyn, hosting live music. It quickly became a sanctuary for working musicians struggling to make ends meet.

“It was so nice to just be able to perform at a place and tell people where to come out,” says saxophonist Ally Chapel of the Brass Queens. “We had been playing outdoors for a year, kind of popping up in places where people would hire us to play on their stoops for birthdays and stuff, but it was really nice to have that familiarity of a venue performance in such a dark time.”

The duo each faced their own personal challenges at the time. Klepper’s relationship of seven years deteriorated while opening Wild Birds and the stresses of trying to keep a fledgling business afloat during the pandemic sent him into depression.

Bonner feels drained after navigating the business through Covid’s ever-changing landscaping all while making sure musicians and patrons were taken care of.

“I’m incredibly thrilled that [Wild Birds] is still even happening and I’ll never take it for granted,” he says. “But having been so battered around by the various obstacles from opening to then staying open to then dealing with additional surges, it kind of numbs you.”

‘A venue that feels like home’
The community that has coalesced around WIld Birds includes many of the musicians who perform there, like Tucker, who regularly plays basketball with Klepper and now considers him a close friend. Or Bermiss, who comes to hang on his nights off and watch other musicians.

Bermiss applauds Klepper and Bonner for “not trying to get rich, but enrich the experience and community around them.” He adds that “It’s rare, especially in New York, which is so rough and tumble, to have a venue that feels like home. I can count on one hand those kinds of places.”

Chapel says most of the Brass Queens live within walking distance of Wild Birds and one member recently rented an apartment because of its proximity to the venue.

Klepper and Bonner are starting to view Wild Birds as home too. Klepper says a switch flipped about four months ago—he’s finally at a point where he can be himself and take a seat in the audience without thinking too much about the business.

Bonner seconds that, adding that he feels the duo has finally accomplished what they originally set out to do.

Tucker is in the middle of an 11-week-long European tour opening for Tool with the metal horn group Brass Against. Even with massive festival and stadium shows on the horizon, he says it’s been bittersweet not having his weekly gig at Wild Birds.

“I already can’t wait to come back to play at Wild Birds. There’s something about it that transcends…” Tucker pauses for a moment. “To me, the reason for playing music is so fully present whenever we play there.”