Snobs Welcome

There’s a building in Dobbs Ferry that’s been a brewery, a Bible factory, and an artist’s enclave. Now it hosts something harder to categorize, and that’s exactly the point.

HUDCO, the 9,000-square-foot industrial co-working space on the Dobbs Ferry waterfront, has quietly become one of the most interesting music venues in the lower Hudson Valley. Not because of the square footage. Not because of the bar. Because of what happens when the right people get the right space and decide to use it with genuine intention.

On April 10th, that intention gets a full workout. The latest installment of HUDCO Presents brings Armo (a rhythm-section powerhouse with deep roots in Antibalas, Fela Kuti’s tradition, and the New York underground) along with opening performer Marcus World Soul, a philosopher-percussionist whose approach to the drum kit is as likely to reference a Santería ceremony as it is Earth, Wind & Fire.

Tickets start at $25. Abundant free parking. Right by the Metro-North station. A far cry from a $50 Brooklyn club show, and, more than a few attendees will tell you, a far better night.

THE VENUE: WHERE HISTORY MEETS THE HANG

Doug Schneider is a freelance photographer, drummer, co-founder of Via Viaggio (a local edibles company), and an investor in HUDCO, which, on paper, sounds like a lot of hats. In practice, it makes perfect sense. Creative freedom is the thread that runs through everything he does, and HUDCO, the co-working and event space founded in early 2019 by Christy Knell, Katherine Bagby, and Christina Cohen, is exactly the kind of place that attracts people who think that way.

Knell handles creative direction and runs the agency Knell and Co.; Bagby, a Doctor of Physical Therapy and Pilates specialist, oversees wellness programming; and Cohen, a designer, shaped the interior vision that makes the space feel the way it does. When the collective outgrew a smaller shared office in Dobbs Ferry and relocated to the current 9,000-square-foot space, Schneider saw something others might have missed. “As soon as I saw the raw size of it and the way Christina was going to design it,” he says, “it just screamed to me that this has to be a music venue at least part of the time.”

By day, HUDCO operates as a creative co-working hub with roughly 200 members, ranging from folks with dedicated offices to people who drop in once a week for a change of scenery. Boxing Day Cafe, open mornings and early afternoons, runs the espresso bar (flat whites, golden milk lattes, the works) while Picture Book, a small but serious bookstore with author signings and publishing connections, holds a spot near the entrance.

At night, for events, the bar gets its liquor license activated. Craft cocktails, mocktails, wine, and beer, curated by Clink with Colleen, who designs drinks specifically for each show, riffing off the band and the vibe of the evening.

The space has windows on three sides. Dimmable elegant fixtures. Industrial bones that carry the history of the building without trying to make a statement about it. It’s the kind of room that feels expensive without being precious.

“You step in there and you feel like you’re in some kind of loft in Brooklyn — but you’re actually right here, just minutes from home.” — Doug Schneider

For the Armo show, the floor gets cleared. A dance floor. Lounge seating on the perimeter for those who prefer to move in their heads. Schneider is a student of Bill Graham: he’s been reading the legendary promoter’s memoir, taking notes on the art of hospitality. Graham was famous for roaming his venues with a clipboard, putting apples out for the audience, obsessing over the details that most people would never notice. Schneider is building that same ethos at a much smaller scale. Which, paradoxically, is what makes it work.

“I really take pride in taking care of our artists,” he says. “Armo came in last August, and we set them up with a beautiful green room, all this hospitality. They were like, ‘Yeah, we never get this anywhere else.'”

The experience doesn’t stop with the music. Vendors fill the atrium that anchors the stage; Schneider calls it his “Shakedown Street” moment, inspired by the parking lot scene at jam band shows he’s been going to for decades. This time: Sage Cacao, run by Chynna, who brings ceremonial-level cacao (the real stuff, unstripped, made into chocolate pieces or hot drinks, sourced through indigenous South American tradition). Plus Flours Pasta & Bakeshop, whose chef, Sofia Todisco, will be making handmade pasta on site, available to ticket holders and band alike.

THE BAND: NO CONDITION IS PERMANENT

Jordan McLean is walking his dog, Rita Loup, through Ridgewood, Queens, when we catch up. He’s a Hell’s Kitchen kid, a trumpeter, an OG of the Daptone scene: he was playing with Lee Fields before the label was even called Daptone, back when it was still Desco. He played with Sharon Jones before she fronted the Dap-Kings. He was the associate music director for the Tony Award-winning Broadway production of Fela!, for which he also wrote original arrangements.

He is, in other words, one of the people most qualified on the planet to carry Fela Kuti’s musical tradition forward. And Armo, the six-piece band he co-leads and a lean offshoot of the internationally touring Antibalas, is how he’s choosing to do it.

Antibalas means “bulletproof” in Spanish. The band has been one of the flagship Afrobeat ensembles in the world for over two decades, touring internationally, keeping the flame of Fela’s tradition alive in Brooklyn and beyond. Armo (the name’s origin is, by McLean’s insistence, an inside joke that must remain an enigma) grew out of a single unrehearsed set in 2017 at a Relix-produced event blending music and spirituality. McLean looked around the table at the ramen spot after the show. Everybody had played the tunes cold, no rehearsal, and it was locked. He knew immediately that this should be a band.

“In a way, we are just a jam band where everybody knows the parts — but we don’t rehearse.” — Jordan McLean

Which sounds paradoxical until McLean explains the mechanics. Armo maintains a working document of over 30 songs, mostly original material, with a handful of rarefied Tony Allen and Evo Taylor tunes, plus a few Fela tracks. A set list gets made, either in advance or night-of. The tune gets counted off. Then, as McLean puts it, “we abandon the plan.”

Who plays the solo? Unknown. Where the vocals land in the arrangement? Different every time. McLean’s trumpet improvises freely. Marcus, the band’s singer, takes his cue from what’s unfolding beneath him in real time. It is, by any measure, a jam band; the parts just happen to be the deep, specific grooves of West African funk.

McLean prefers the term “rhythm music” over Afrobeat. Fela coined the Afrobeat label to define his specific sound, and McLean respects that specificity too much to apply it loosely. But the DNA is unmistakable: the interlocking bass and guitar, the horns sitting on top like a second voice, the percussion anchoring everything in something older than the genre label.

The band draws members from Daptone Records, TV on the Radio, and other corners of New York’s left-of-center music world. The sound is set not by a conductor or a chart but by what McLean calls an “agreed-upon, nonverbal sense of swing.” Everybody locked in. Nobody overplaying.

And yes, it’s political. It was always political. Fela Kuti was the Bob Marley of West Africa, a man who sang against the Nigerian regime and paid for it repeatedly: his compound raided, his mother thrown from a window by soldiers. Fela’s manager, Rikki Stein, described Fela as a social engineer who was ready to lay his life on the line for his beliefs. That energy carries forward into Armo’s sets. Marcus, the band’s vocalist, refers to the current political moment as “the fuckeration.” McLean recently added a track to the rotation called “No Condition Is Permanent,” a dark, gritty, heavy tune whose message is exactly what it sounds like.

“No regime is permanent. Dick Cheney is dead. We’re feeling the horrible lasting effects of their regimes — but they’re essentially otherwise irrelevant.” — Jordan McLean

McLean lives in Queens. The train ride up from Grand Central, hugging the river, feels to him like the South of France. “There’s no difference in energy between playing a venue like HUDCO and a traditional downtown club,” he says. “It’s all about the intention of why the space was set up.”

He’s played HUDCO before: last August, Armo drew over 100 people on a summer night when it seemed like half the Rivertowns was away. Now he’s back for the spring, when the room can actually fill the way the music deserves.

As for what first-timers should expect? McLean’s wife tested this. She told him Armo is the band she’d feel confident bringing anyone she knows, at any stage of life, whatever kind of music they thought they liked or didn’t like. “Everybody will like this band,” she told him. “There’s no reason not to. Unless you’re a total jazz snob or classical music snob.” McLean turned that into an invitation, not a warning. “Snobs Welcome.”

THE OPENER: A DIALOGUE, NOT A CONCERT

Marcus Kreiger goes by Marcus World Soul. The name started as the title of a philosophical music project (an exploration of collective consciousness through sound) and turned personal when his Instagram account made it literal. He grew up in Rochester and started playing drums alongside his father, a self-taught funk and R&B bass player. They played Earth, Wind & Fire together. The father’s touch, Marcus says, is in everything he plays, no matter how deep into classical percussion or Cuban or Haitian or Brazilian or West African tradition he goes.

He studied classical percussion at the Hartt School of Music. He plays the Batá drum for Santería ceremonies and Haitian dance classes. He’s released three DIY EPs (he handles the songwriting, producing, mixing, and singing) as philosophical dispatches, sonic outlets for ideas about divinity, lineage, and language that he’s been carrying for years. He makes music for TV commercials and sports productions. He moved to Sleepy Hollow five years ago, a COVID transplant from Brooklyn who’d already been gravitating toward the river towns on weekends.

His connection to HUDCO came through his partner Chynna, who runs Sage Cacao and vends at HUDCO’s markets and events. He kept showing up. He kept running into Doug Schneider. The rest unfolded the way things do when creative people occupy the same space with enough regularity.

Marcus is opening for Armo on April 10th, and he sees the two sets as deeply related: different dialects of the same musical blend. “Afrobeat is really born out of a mixture of so much different influence,” he says. “What you’ll get with me is a different – almost dialect of the same type of blend — African rhythms and world rhythms, but also with the funk and R&B side.” Dance music with depth. Groove with something underneath it.

He’s been envisioning a performance where musicians sit around a table, drink cacao, and play together in something that feels less like a show and more like a communal gathering, where the participants are as much performers as anyone on stage. April 10th is the beginning of that vision.

THE CANNABIS THREAD

No conversation about this community, or this magazine, skips the plant medicine angle. And this show has one, woven through multiple layers.

Fela Kuti himself was famously connected to cannabis through a preparation called Goro, a thick, syrupy paste made by cooking down cannabis with herbs and honey for days. McLean’s connection to the Fela world runs so deep that Fela’s manager, Rikki Stein, personally shared stories with him about witnessing the making of Goro. The paste, when finished, appears nearly black until you look closer. Then you realize it’s green. “No weed, no Afrobeat,” McLean says simply. “Without weed, Fela is a different person.”

At the show, Sage Cacao brings ceremonial cacao, a plant medicine in its own right, consumed for its euphoric and heart-opening qualities in South American indigenous traditions. Via Viaggio brings edibles. The edibles bar is a feature, not an afterthought.

For McLean personally, cannabis factors into thinking about music, not playing it: it dries out his trumpet embouchure, he says, and that doesn’t work for him. Some Armo members use it regularly. Some don’t touch it. The band, like its music, resists easy categorization.

Marcus World Soul doesn’t personally use cannabis, but he thinks deeply about the connections between plant medicine, percussion, and the ceremonial traditions that have shaped his playing. The cacao on the table that night is not a prop. It’s part of the intention.

WHY YOU SHOULD GO

The case for April 10th is straightforward: world-class rhythm music, a curated food experience, ceremonial cacao, artisan vendors, and a venue that feels like it was designed for exactly this kind of night, all within a few miles of home, for $25 before the week-of bump to $30. Free parking. Metro-North accessible. No six-flight walk-up. No basement venue with a sticky floor.

HUDCO Presents runs roughly quarterly; the next show is likely in July, with another planned for October. The vision is a pace that allows real curation, real hospitality, real care for the experience. This isn’t a venue trying to be a club. It’s something different. Something worth the train ride up.

Jordan McLean’s other band, JMMR (Jordan McLean’s Musical Resistance), also deserves a mention for the heads who want to go deeper: their debut album Resistance Is Fertile (a play on the Borg’s famous Star Trek: The Next Generation line “resistance is futile”) just came out on Nublu Records and is being called “avant-rave” and “electrobeat” by people who are trying to define what exactly it sounds like when jazz-trained improvisers decide to make dance music at 120 to 172 BPM. It’s a lot. It’s worth your time.