Under the Shadow of Punk: Avant Garde Jazz & Experimental Music in New York’s Downtown (1971-85)
—w/ Professor Bernard Gendron
NY’s downtown
- small space — artists independent and affecting each other
- culturally influencing, loci of “hip”
- competition for cultural capital
- changes in aesthetic discourse
- play music to show what was like to be young and living in NY at the time
originary moment (Heidegger’s term)=1972; location: Greenwich Village=Mercer Arts Center, The Kitchen, Oscar Wilde Room (New York Dolls)
The Kitchen
- started for visual arts w/ a grant from NY State Council on the Arts
- Aug 1973 moved to Soho
- improvisation; lots of equipment
- room for composers who liked to perform
- associated with minimalism but breakthrough work performed uptown b/f Kitchen
- 1973 Tom Johnson “Something’s Cooking in the Kitchen” NY Times
- some directors of the Kitchen: Phill Niblock, Jim Burton, Arthur Russell
- La Monte Young & John Cage — previously mostly uptown performances
- 1976 jazz at the kitchen
- shift to improvisation with new director Garrett List
- 1980-82 George Lewis director, even more jazz
- Rock at the kitchen, Rhys Chatham as director
- mid-1970s people besides musicians started going to the Kitchen
- 1977 people already there started playing rock
- Rhys Chatham first saw Ramones & called them “minimalist” and “visceral”
- Glenn Branca and Brit rockers
- the Kitchen moves to Chelsea, run by Philip Glass
- 1981 benefit for Kitchen (funding had gone down); now more rock: David Byrne, Devo, Bush Tetras; some went on tour (1982?)
- Knitting Factory replaces Kitchen: DJ Spooky; Kronos Quartet; crossover music; bands
1970s music critics:
- Tom Johnson (Village Voice) articles and lectures
- John Rockwell (NY Times)
- Robert Palmer
- Johnson and Rockwell=”crossover critics”
other notes:
- emergence of jazz lofts, Newport 1972-79; Sam River’s loft etc.; by 1975 musicians went back to trying to control own spaces; Punk-Funk-Jazz lofts, Tin Palace, Palladium
- East Village early 1960s black population (many moved up to Harlem)
- Arnette Coleman
- Joseph Papp Theatre
- David Murray
- 1979 NY new music festival
- Joseph Bowie tended to open for white groups like Captain Beefheart etc.punk more
- Steve Reich: Drumming=9-piece percussion ensemble w/ female voices and piccolo
aesthetics=ontology of art object; Kant: descriptive aesthetics; Nietzsche, Heidegger: normative aesthetics; Heidegger—any work of art calls forth a certain world
“There was a consensus among composers of the time [early 1960s] that it was considered a compromise to write music with even a veneer of accessibility, for accessibility was not a part of the theoretical platform. It seemed one needed to be a specialist in modern music, or perhaps in love with someone who was, in order to fully appreciate the music which was being written around the time.” ~Rhys Chatham, Composer’s Notebook, 1990