As go Houston’s energy cycles, so go its homegrown cultural contributions, through stages of boom and bust.

So nestled alongside news in late 2018 and early 2019 that both of the city’s multiday music festivals — Day for Night and In Bloom — were going away, was the launch of last year’s Astroworld Festival, conceived by Missouri City rapper Travis Scott, who envisioned and executed a one-day event that celebrated the old theme park, which he described to Rolling Stone as “a way of life — fantasies, imagination.”

Scott truly rang the bell for Houston last year, giving both his ubiquitous album and his festival that quintessentially Houston-centric name: “Astroworld.” The record ended up at No. 7 on Billboard’s year-end top sellers, and the music festival drew fans from near and far.

RELATED: 'Houston Noir' short story collection shines a grim light on the city.

These days, those high- and low-tide cycles of cultural interest are playing out in a larger boom/bust manner outside Beltway 8. And though there’s no true measure other than anecdotal evidence compiled through cumulative little successes, Houston appears to be having what one might call “a moment” — even absent its summer and winter music gatherings.

Earlier this year, Solange released “When I Get Home,” a record that drew rave reviews from media outlets, including Pitchfork, Entertainment Weekly and the Los Angeles Times, and debuted at No. 9 on the Billboard 200. That album’s thematic content was hyper-local, with song titles reflecting her local ties: “S. McGregor,” “Almeda,” “Binz” and “Beltway.”

And in March, young author Bryan Washington released “Lot,” his first short-story collection, to radiant reviews, including those on NPR and in the New York Times. Like Solange, Washington used his titles to map out physical as well as emotional terrain, and the locations were also local: “Alief,” “Elgin,” “Shepherd,” “Navigation.”

The Times felt the need to inform its readers that “there isn’t a single pick-up truck” in the book but that “his characters move through streets named so often — Richmond and Waugh, Rusk and Fairview — that they come to have talismanic power, like the street names in Springsteen songs.”

“One of the driving forces for me when I was writing was the interesting role place can have in a narrative,” Washington said in by phone. “When people think of L.A. or New York, those are cities on firmer grounding in the collective imagination of American fiction. Main Street or Hollywood Boulevard or Rodeo Drive, you can attach to it because of the repetition. I thought it would be interesting to take the places I knew and attach the narrative until they were inextricable.”

And the city’s food scene continues to capture attention from those on the outside, as it did in 2016 when Anthony Bourdain went well off the beaten path here for an episode of his CNN series “Parts Unknown.” Admittedly, Houston got shut out at the James Beard Awards a few weeks ago, even though the nominees were announced here.

Still, last fall Esquire food writer Jeff Gordinier named Houston’s Nancy’s Hustle as No. 3 on his list of the country’s best new restaurants.

Then, for the second time in the span of a year, GQ trumpeted the city’s culinary efforts. Last week, writer Brett Martin ran his Best New Restaurants 2019 column, which featured the eateries Georgia James and Indigo. Here are his opening lines: “Let me begin with two dinners in Houston. These were two meals over the course of 24 hours that felt like they summed up what it meant to eat in America in 2019.”

Khruangbin cool

Just about any city’s cultural creatives spring from its soil and flourish with artsy foliage native to the region. Which is, in and of itself, a good thing: art and culture that differentiates itself through some locational fingerprint.

But the bicoastal pull so often dictates cultural conversations — certainly with regard to things like popular music and book publishing. Often cities not named New York and Los Angeles — where art and entertainment infrastructure has been built and based for decades — shoulder a second-class-citizen chip.

So when some light shines on our other corners, it bears a warming effect.

I was heartened to snare a copy of the British music magazine MOJO recently and find a teaser to the band Khruangbin on the cover. Two members of the trio have relocated from Houston to Los Angeles, but the group formed here, and its cool, largely instrumental, surf-influenced funk draws from around the world — fromAsia, South America, the Middle East, the Caribbean — befitting Houston’s rich cultural mix. (The group’s name is inspired by the Thai word for “airplane.”)

The band’s “Con Todo el Mundo” was all over the year-end lists for the best albums of 2018. And the group recently enjoyed a sold-out tour of Australia, where it repeatedly had its shows moved to larger venues because of surging demand. (And even though all of the members may not live here anymore, they still wore Houston like a badge Down Under as when guitarist Mark Speer told the crowd in Adelaide, “It feels just like home, nice and hot and warm …We are from Houston, Texas.”)

“Everyone is just obsessed with them right now,” said John Hill, a Houston native and Grammy-winning producer who works out of Los Angeles. “Which is really exciting for them. And I saw that the guitarist, Mark (Speer), used to work at Rockin’ Robin. I grew up going to that guitar shop.”

Hill has been working with Stephen Wrabel, a singer-songwriter and musician from Houston who has enjoyed enormous success writing hit songs for artists including Ke$ha and Backstreet Boys and the forthcoming Pink single. He also brought up Happy Perez, a Houston producer who has worked with Houston rappers Z-Ro and Paul Wall, as well as pop stars including Ariana Grande.

“I just did a session with him,” Hill said. “And we spent half the day looking at restaurant menus from Houston, talking about how good the food is.”

Houston lit

Mike Freedman has for years expressed frustration at the long dry spell for a great Houston novel. There have been several notable novels set here — Larry McMurtry’s “Terms of Endearment,” Kim Wozencraft’s “Rush.” But Freedman — a Houston native with an MBA from Rice University and three tours of duty in the Army Special Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan — wasn’t referring to a novel set in Houston but rather one about Houston. A story that reflected the city’s nasty charm.

Freedman wields an expertly sharp satiric voice that he applied to “School Board” in 2014, a Houston-set novel about a high school senior running a cunning campaign to be elected to the school board.

July brings “King of the Mississippi,” his second novel, which uses strategic management consulting as its point of entry for deeper cultural queries. Best-selling author Tim O’Brien compared Freedman’s work to that of master satirists Joseph Heller and Stanley Elkin.

Early in the novel, one character, who had been living in New York, says to another, “Nothing quite like coming back home to Houston from the city.”

Freedman goes on to describe it as “code speak: I can play with the big boys on Wall Street, but I have chosen to return home and be a big fish in a small pond.”

Washington’s story collection presented Houston as a series of interconnected areas functioning as one organic ecosystem.

“It’s fascinating that you’d call it a ‘mantra’ because no one seems to listen when you tell them Houston is the most diverse city in the country right now,” he said. “You can yell it from the rooftops, and you get disbelief in return.

“But it’s not strange to me. I grew up in it. It’s my vantage point, and it’s a specific one. Part of the problem may be that Texas has its own lore. And some of it is that gazes shift to Houston and then shift elsewhere. But I do think there’s a more prolonged interest in Houston at the moment, whether it’s Travis Scott or Solange or the food scene. Some of it is people who live outside the city. But some of it is people who live here and are focusing on everything there is to find here.”

Unsung pioneers

Of course, any “moment” will find resisters, doubters or others who have seen such moments spark and then pfft.

Mathew Knowles, father of Beyoncé and Solange, would rather see permanent infrastructure than a series of moments. He has been in Houston more than 40 years and spent more than half of that time working in the music industry. He said the city continually ignores its own resources that would allow it to flourish in a grander way. He referenced Houston’s Duke/Peacock music label and recording studio, a hub for R&B, blues, jazz and gospel in the mid-20th century.

“Or look what J. Prince did with Rap-A-Lot Records,” Knowles said. “This was a man who created a music industry here almost from scratch. But there are people appointed to key positions in the city who don’t have a clue about entertainment. Who won’t knock on my door or J. Prince’s door and ask to help them. … People here don’t understand the millions of dollars Austin makes with South by Southwest.”

But Knowles’ roots here run deep. In addition to his Music World — a multiplatform music-industry company — he oversaw the early careers of his daughters.

Those two artists have found international success, but interestingly they’ve done so while also doubling down on their connectivity to their hometown.

Beyoncé was already a global pop star before her “Beyoncé” record was released in 2013. But that record found her extending her multimedia reach beyond hit songs. And the very first line uttered on the record was, “Ms. Third Ward, your first question: What is your aspiration in life?”

Her performance at the Coachella festival last year, documented in the just-released Netflix film “Homecoming,” became a thing of instant legend, as Beyoncé celebrated historically black colleges and universities such as Houston’s Texas Southern, where she has a scholarship fund.

Solange had to cancel a show with the Texas Southern Ocean of Soul band at Day for Night in 2017 because of weather, but during her main set, she still drew from a long and distinguished marching-band tradition.

“From a proud-father perspective, I love what Beyoncé has done to bring awareness to historical black colleges,” Knowles said. “She and Solange, they’ve always appreciated that. But they’ve brought this awareness about where they’re from.”

Hip-hop, R&B and jazz have proven fields where Houston successfully sent its music out into the world. The jazz program at the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts has seeded multiple generations of jazz with players including Jason Moran, Robert Glasper and James Francies, who are fluent in jazz and also creatively restless enough to explore other forms.

“I feel like we should just set up a table at that high school’s graduation,” said Don Was, the producer and head of the prestigious Blue Note jazz label. “Get your diploma, sign a record deal. The amount of talent coming out of there is astounding.”

‘Keep Houston underrated’

Of course, Houston has long had a tenuous relationship with recognition. T-shirts have circulated for a few years that read “Keep Houston underrated.”

GQ’s Brett Martin said he was “cautious coming in as an outsider and suggesting something like Houston having a moment. I tried to be careful and interrogate that. There’s this false narrative that can occur when something like GQ or a New Yorker says, ‘OK, you’re cool now.’ So I hope I haven’t done anything to ruin that.”

He said he was as surprised as anybody to fall under the city’s spell. He grew up in the Northeast, where he said his preconceptions were largely defined by Houston expats. “They were people who described running away,” he said. “They reported this empty, awful suburban hell,” he said.

He settled in New Orleans in 2011 and headed west on Interstate 10 a few times. Martin pitched a Houston story to GQ several years ago but didn’t find much interest. Things changed last year with his 6,000-word piece onto which was grafted a heavy headline: “Houston Is the New Capital of Southern Cool.” He recognizes the logistical challenges the city’s spacious breadth presents and understands they’re worth overcoming.

“But you have to forget a lot of what we believe about cities,” he said. “You have to sort of learn to see through a different set of eyes what the urban experience is in 2019. It doesn’t conform — in good and bad ways — to what we were trained to want in an urban experience.

“But Houston has become an inevitable stop for me.”

The impending 50th anniversary of the moon landing has added further shine to Houston this year, with the Johnson Space Center an epicenter of the activity that shot a man from Earth to its natural satellite.

The fervor for the Apollo program a half-century later reflects the fervor for space exploration during its first decade, before such dangerous travel became common enough that the public’s imagination was sated and moved on to other thoughts.

Much like hit-making songwriters or a favored restaurant, this nostalgic affinity for the remarkable achievements of the Apollo program will enjoy a moment of brightness and again fade from view. Moments that pass time and again, like the phases of the moon.

andrew.dansby@chron.com