Inspired by Brooklyn | Music and a Movie

Tonight! Jazz violinist Kensuke Shoji performs, followed by a screening of the 2008 film A Hole in a Fence, introduced by filmmaker D. W. Young. 

About "Inspired by Brooklyn"

The Brooklyn vibe is in the room at this cabaret-style series presented in connection with CBH’s current exhibition, “Brooklyn Is…”.  With a musical performance followed by a Brooklyn-centric documentary, “Inspired by Brooklyn” celebrates the people, neighborhoods, and spirit of Brooklyn. 

Featured Performer

Every Sunday night, “Ken and Friends” play at one of Brooklyn’s great neighborhood institutions, the beloved Red Hook bar and gathering place, Sunny’s. “Ken” is jazz violinist Kensuke Shoji, who was born in Gifu, Japan and who joined his father’s bluegrass band as a teenager. He moved to the U.S.A. as a young adult to study jazz violin with Berklee String Department chair Matt Glaser and world renown violinist Christian Howes. Kensuke moved to New York in 2013 to play with Alex Hargreaves, Barry Harris, Jacob Jolliff, Maria Muldaur and others, and is a proud Brooklyn resident.

Featured Documentary

A Hole in a Fence is a 2008 film that chronicles the changing fortunes of a unique abandoned lot in Red Hook, Brooklyn and explores the complicated issues of development, class and identity facing the city's most populous borough. It's the story of a vanished homeless community and the young architect who documented it; of a real urban farm run by local kids amidst a landscape of industrial decay; of young graffiti writers losing their stomping grounds; of the arrival of a controversial Ikea megastore; of a photographer's vision of nature's renewal; of the doomed struggle to save a rare part of the neighborhood's working waterfront; and of a filmmaker's discovery of a fleeting, hidden world on the other side of a rusty old fence.