Every community has a collective Id that hides just below its emotional surface. The observant could spot it when paying the right amount of attention. But for those not looking or listening, this energy is likely to remain invisible until it’s too late and they’ve been swamped by it. History and art aren’t communities per se, but they too evolve in tune with this mass feeling, their progress is rooted in it, even driven by it.
History Dog is a quartet of highly lauded Brooklyn-based improvisers. They’re scholars of the local and global Id, experts at accessing it within any number of distinct musical worlds (jazz, punk, noise, classical, avant-garde), always shaping personal dialects which address this subterranean collective imagination. Like all great improvisers, they feel it as it’s taking shape. So while you may be arriving at History Dog’s debut album, Root Systems, to check out this cool coming-together of a Brooklyn underground super-group, you’re likely to leave in thrall to a slightly different sound of Now.
History Dog is trumpeter Chris Williams (he/him), drummer Lesley Mok (they/them), bass guitarist Luke Stewart (he/him) and vocalist Shara Lunon (she/they). Each one is an active presence in New York’s music community, who, having established their individual practices in/around the jazz tradition, has chosen to travel far beyond its prescribed borders. Their expansive interests have led them to embrace electronics, to reconsider the roles of their primary instruments, and to embrace a decidedly post-genre attitude. The weight of their collective chops and credits reveal a high cultural standing. Yet if they’re not touring with jazz legends and arts notables, or contributing to kunsthalle programming somewhere around the world, you’ll find them around Brooklyn’s various DIY haunts, playing with one another, or any number of friends and colleagues. Each regularly produces and curates nights, sharing sounds and ideas, constantly uniting around the music to see what else can happen. This is why they’re fluent in the Id, in producing what Lunon calls “pure expression of feeling that speaks to the culture of our city and community.”
Though members of History Dog had often played with one-another in various configurations, the quartet first came together organically in August 2023, for Heavy Florals, Lunon’s occasional experimental-music gathering at Sisters in Clinton Hill. Stewart was a last-second stand-in for another musician who couldn’t make it. Their shared prompt was applying an electroacoustic approach to a longform build (playing uninterrupted beginning to end), and seeing where it all shakes out. Lunon had a few phrases and vocal effects, Williams’ trumpet and Stewart’s Fender bass were filtered through an arsenal of pedals, and Mok was armed with their usual quickness of mind and tidal kit attack. The night began with technical difficulties but ended in a revelation, a mountain of sound, and in Mok’s memory, “a clarity of vision. I clearly remember the last 20 minutes of the piece. We were all in this tunnel together, seeing the end, and hungry to get there.”

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