It was one of those mild Friday evenings on Rugby Road, a side street south of Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Up on the porch of a big old wooden house, a vocalist sang standards for neighbors sitting on picnic blankets.
“I saw a friend in the audience,” said Trevor Robertson, 32, the bassist for a quartet.
The band was making its debut at Operation Gig, a concert series launched during the Covid-19 pandemic that has put on more than 300 shows at Victorian houses in the Flatbush neighborhood. Its seventh season runs through October.
There are no tickets or velvet ropes. The suggested donation is $10 a person. Porch owners sometimes set out snack chips and cans of beer. But the tone stays family-friendly, and volumes moderate so that no one calls the police.
Roy Nathanson, 75, a jazz saxophonist who lives nearby has been playing gigs for the series since his own nonprofit, Brooklyn Porch Music, stopped offering performances by professionals. Operation Gig “kept the porch concert thing together,” Mr. Nathanson said.
Announcements for Operation Gig shows, which run Fridays through Sundays, go out weekly by email to an audience of 2,000.
Aaron Lisman, 50, started what became Operation Gig with an outdoor Bluegrass jam he and friends played for an audience of about twenty in 2020.
The porch of his home was the first venue. He had purchased the teal house in “Grey-Gardens condition,” and restored it in 2012.
“I’m a sucker for a beautiful porch,” he said.
Though an amateur, he saw professional musician friends sidelined by the pandemic. The energy at his original jam proved electric, and it encouraged Mr. Lisman to dream. Operation Gig now offers him a front-row seat for exceptional concerts and lets him hang out with the talent. “New York has the greatest musicians,” he said.
He walks the quiet streets in Ditmas Park and Beverly Square West, knocking on doors of Victorians hoping to add to the roster of venues. He said he looks for broad porches and mature trees.
“You can’t have a concert without shade,” he said.
He said that one homeowner on Buckingham Road has hosted more than 50 shows. This season has featured about 30 porches, with some repeats.
The audience on a beautiful day can attract more than 60 people and raise about $700 for Mr. Lisman’s fund that pays performers. They get paid for rainouts, too.
“We’re certainly not paying anyone’s rent,” he said. All musicians receive about $150, double the stipend Operation Gig offered initially. Mr. Lisman, a lead bioinformatics software engineer for Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, has spent his own money on performances when crowd contributions fell short. He also started a Gofundme.com campaign, and the Brooklyn Arts Council issued grants to Operation Gig.
Mike Gantcher, 56, a tour guide and retired Wall Street trader, recently contributed $10,000 to pay musicians and hire interns.
“We wanted to free Aaron up from the legwork,” he said. Now it’s usually interns who roll up to shows pushing the “gig wagon,” a garden cart stocked with cables and three microphones that lives in Mr. Lisman’s bike shed.
The sound system is midsize by design, he said. An amplifier with extra power would have been heavy and given people too much opportunity to irritate the neighbors.
Mr. Lisman said he will occasionally meet a musician who is not game to play a porch. One worried about only playing for a handful of people. Mr. Lisman said that’s always possible, but “the challenge has been to push through those moments, and to just keep doing it.”
Mr. Lisman said he aims for an eclectic mix of music.
Mir Naquibul Islam, a tabla drummer originally from Bangladesh, improvised for Operation Gig this summer in an ensemble with flute, harmonium and Kamancheh, a traditional Persian string instrument. Mr. Lisman has also booked opera singers and Meshugana Mambo, which brings together Jewish klezmer music with Latin rhythms.
Mr. Islam, 37, lives in the neighborhood and expected people to stop and listen for fifteen minutes. “They stayed for an hour,” he said. “We made the music together.”
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