They've remained friends ever since, and in that time Kolovos' labels have issued defiantly non-commercial releases by artists including the acclaimed New York duo 75 Dollar Bill, L.A. Both were part of Open City, a turn-of-the-century noise band. The pair had been pining for something with what Maxwell describes as "the funk of these feral spaces we grew up in" when the Bootleg closed. “I think we actually met at the Smell downtown,” Maxwell says of his friend, “where he was playing some aggressively abstract music - and I was like, ‘What the hell is this?’” He describes 2220’s vision as “Lincoln Center meets the Smell,” connecting the highbrow New York arts institution with the downtown L.A. "That's the devil's bargain we've made, is that Peter will keep working and I'll donate all my labor and time to the space," Maxwell says with a laugh. Kolovos' paycheck comes from his work with his family's Westside real estate investment and development business, he says, a job that "helps stabilize stuff and make things happen."
#Big l put it on bootleg series#
In addition to Black Editions and the PRB, the facility will house long-running film programming organization the LA Filmforum, whose former home, the Egyptian, was purchased by Netflix last May writer, dancer and archivist Harmony Holiday’s Mythscience Archives of recorded jazz and poetry performance organization Pehrspace Steve Lowenthal’s experimental guitar label Vin du Select Qualitite (which is part of the Black Editions Group) the Acropolis Cinema screening series and the Unwrinkled Ear, which has curated performances by an essential roster of international improvisational artists. The complex, which spans 2214-2220 Beverly, features a total of nearly 8,500 square feet of performance, theater and office space. From there the programming veers in wildly eclectic directions, executed by a cross-disciplinary collective of curators, promoters and archivists.
The renovated performance space, bar and archives will open to the public Monday with a solo performance by jazz pianist Jason Moran. "It was very serendipitous, let's put it that way," Kolovos says on a recent afternoon, sitting at a bar table with Maxwell in the front room of the long-ago bra factory. Before the pandemic, Kolovos often booked programs at the Bootleg.Įighteen months later, he and his friend and collaborator of two decades, Andrew Maxwell, 49, the cofounder of the writers salon the Poetic Research Bureau, are owners of 2220 Arts + Archives, which bought the building for an undisclosed amount after the Bootleg complex went up for sale in the summer of 2020 with an asking price of $5.25 million. He produced that night of five- and six-stringed chaos, one of many that he’s facilitated as founder of Black Editions, a label group and concert series. The musician and record label owner Peter Kolovos, 44, had no idea that the Bootleg’s coda would be scored by improvised banjo. The pandemic was bearing down on America and gutting nightlife.Īs the weeks turned to months, the Filipinotown club, which for two decades served as a launching pad for countless artists, eventually announced that it, like other crucial small venues including the Blue Whale and the Satellite, was shuttering for good. Though no one knew it at the time, the experimental guitarists-banjoists Eugene Chadbourne and Wendy Eisenberg would end up giving the final performance on the Bootleg Theater’s stage.
#Big l put it on bootleg archive#
The new venue and archive opens on Monday. Peter Kolovos and Andrew Maxwell, owner-curators of 2220 Arts + Archives, are photographed at their location in the historic Filipinotown neighborhood of Los Angeles.
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