The Brill Building (built 1931 as the Alan E. Lefcourt Building and designed by Victor Bark Jr.[1] [2]) is an office building located at 1619 Broadway on 49th Street in the Manhattan borough of New York City, just north of Times Square and further uptown from the historic musical Tin Pan Alley neighborhood. It is famous for housing music industry offices and studios where some of the most popular American music tunes were written. The building has been described as "the most important generator of popular songs in the Western world."[3]
The building is 11 stories and has approximately 175,000 square feet (16,300 m2) of rentable area.
Even before World War II it became a centre of activity for the popular music industry, especially music publishing and songwriting. Scores of music publishers had offices in the Brill Building. Once songs had been published, the publishers sent song pluggers to the popular white bands and radio stations. These song pluggers would sing and/or play the song for the band leaders to encourage bands to play their music.
During the ASCAP strike of 1941, many of the composers, authors and publishers turned to pseudonyms in order to have their songs played on the air.
Brill Building songs were constantly at the top of the Hit Parade and played by the leading bands of the day:
Publishers included:
Composers included:
The music publishers at this time occasionally followed the racial codes of the day. They either had their own (typically white) contract writers composing songs or they opened their doors to publish songs of others, but sometimes hid the fact that songs were created by non-white or non-Christian artists. Yet black songwriters such as James Bland, Scott Joplin, and Eubie Blake never felt the need to resort to this kind of subterfuge and were internationally renowned for their compositions.
Some Jewish songwriters did adopt anglicized noms de plume, but most did not. While some claim anti-semitism was widespread in America, it was not characteristic of the music industry in which Jewish composers, such as Kern, Gershwin, Rodgers, and many others flourished without significant discrimination.
In the 1930s some publishers in the Brill Building specialized in publishing the songs of African American Swing composers. For example, Lewis Music published the songs of Erskine Hawkins and Avery Parrish, among others. These tunes were called "Race Music", the euphemism for songs written by black artists. If a composer wrote an instrumental (and even sometimes if there were already lyrics), the publishers provided their own lyricists. Top selling songs on the (white) Hit Parade, such as Tuxedo Junction and Jersey Bounce, were originally composed as instrumentals by black swing artists, but were not played by white bands on the radio until they had been published with lyrics, often by white writers.
The Brill Building's name has been widely adopted as a shorthand term for a broad and influential stream of American mainstream popular song (strongly influenced by Latin music and rhythm and blues) which enjoyed great commercial success in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s. Many significant American and international publishing companies, music agencies and recording labels were based in New York, and although these ventures were naturally spread across many locations, the Brill Building was regarded as probably the most prestigious address in New York for music business professionals. The term "The Brill Building Sound" is somewhat inaccurate, however, since much of the music so categorised actually emanated from other locations — music historian Ken Emerson nominates buildings at 1650 Broadway and 1697 Broadway as other significant bases of activity in this field.
By 1962 the Brill Building contained 165 music businesses : A musician could find a publisher and printer, cut a demo, promote the record and cut a deal with radio promoters, all within this one building. The creative culture of the independent music companies in the Brill Building and the nearby 1650 Broadway came to define the influential "Brill Building Sound" and the style of popular songwriting and recording created by its writers and producers.[4]
Carole King described the atmosphere at the 'Brill Building' publishing houses of the period:
Many of the best works in this diverse category were written by a loosely affiliated group of songwriter-producer teams — mostly duos — that enjoyed immense success and who collectively wrote some of the biggest hits of the period. Many in this group were close friends and/or (in the cases of Goffin-King, Mann-Weil and Greenwich-Barry) married couples, as well as creative and business associates — and both individually and as duos, they often worked together and with other writers in a wide variety of combinations. Some (Carole King, Burt Bacharach, Neil Sedaka, Boyce and Hart) recorded and had hits with their own music.
Other famous musicians who were headquartered in The Brill Building:
Among the hundreds of hits written by this group are "Yakety Yak" (Leiber-Stoller), "Save the Last Dance for Me" (Pomus-Shuman), "The Look of Love" (Bacharach-David), "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do" (Sedaka-Greenfield), "Devil in Disguise" (Giant-Baum-Kaye), "The Loco-Motion" (Goffin-King), "We Gotta Get Out of This Place" (Mann-Weil) and "River Deep, Mountain High" (Spector-Greenwich-Barry).
The list below is a partial list of the studio musicians who contributed to the Brill Building sound:
Many of these writers came to prominence while under contract to Aldon Music, a publishing company founded ca. 1958 by aspiring music entrepreneur Don Kirshner and industry veteran Al Nevins. Aldon was not initially located in the Brill Building, but rather, a block away at 1650 Broadway (at 51st St.).
1650 Broadway was built to be a musician's headquarters, so much so that the laws at the time required that the "front" door be placed on the side of the building due to laws restricting musicians from entering buildings from the front. Most so-called 'Brill Building' writers began their careers at 1650 Broadway, and the building continued to house many record labels throughout the decades.
Toni Wine explains:
| “ | There were really two huge buildings that were housing publishing companies, songwriters, record labels, and artists. The Brill Building was one. But truthfully, most of your R&B, really rock & roll labels and publishing companies, including the studio, which was in the basement and was called Allegro Studios, was in 1650 Broadway. They were probably a block and a half away from each other. 1650 and the Brill Building. | ” |
The 1996 movie Grace of My Heart is in parts a fictionalised account of the life in the Brill Building. Illeana Douglas plays a songwriter loosely based on Carole King.
In Sweet Smell of Success, J.J. Hunsecker and his sister Susie live on one of the upper floors of the Brill Building. This is unusual since it is not a residential building.