December 8, 2007

General Comments

This is the place to post any general comments, suggestions, queries or bones of contention about the downtown music guide.

5 comments:

Chris Becker said...

Peter - This is a comment I left on Steve Smith's blog which is where I first read about your resource. You've provided a comprehensive overview of the downtown scene and was reminded of Greg Tate's quote.

A relevant quote from Greg Tate that haunted me ever since I read it:

"I first started coming up to New York from DC at the tail end of the loft era, and that was the last time jazz had a street life in New York...by the time I got up here around 82 that's when the whole No New York, punk jazz, James White and the Blacks, Defunkt, Laswell and Zorn kind of get mixed in, it was this moment where the segregation between black and white avant-gardes momentarily dissolved and then reformed again."

The segregation Tate describes does exist, and how a creative person might address that in their art is a thread that runs through all of my own work.

One reason I love living in NYC is for this sort of historical precedent. It is a vein one can tap into even in this 21st century.

Anonymous said...

hi Peter

Of course I think you would cover my old group, the Soldier String Quartet - we did many concerts during that period of r&b and punk influenced "classical" music, and collaborated with many people in your history, including the "jazz" "rock" and "uptown" people.

But unrelated to my own music, I think it might be a good idea to speak to Giorgio Gomelski, who is starting a historical video project on the "avant garde" in NYC and was involved in nearly all those streams in one manner or another.

Anonymous said...

also, a pet peeve, I think very influential composers during that time who are unjustly left out of histories are Kurt Hoffman and Fritz van Orden from the Ordinaires, Lenny Pickett from Borneo Horns, and Scott Johnson. I think they really changed "downtown" music towards more of a compositional and polyrhytmic bent, and are kind of founders of what a lot of people do now, but have fallen through the cracks of historical ignorance/revisionism.

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Anonymous said...

Very interesting
I'm adding in RSS reader