Wonderful interview! Greatly appreciated. For more on this era, I highly recommend Tom Johnson's book "The Voice of New Music: New York City, 1972-1982" (1989).
This is such an interesting time in the history of music. Two different avant garde music scenes collide with the burgeoning new wave and jazz fusion music scenes to create a totally new type of progressive rock
How interesting that the Manifestival poster features a tromba marina (trumpet marine), a bowed instrument with one string that's played entirely using harmonics.
Best thing at the Zu festival was T-Girls, I was there. I am not surprised their recording disappeared as those people were really anal about not letting recordings float around. Arsenal sucked, no offense but they did. The reconstructed Gong was just long jams based on old Gong songs with horribly muddy funk bass by Laswell. That attempt by Gomelski to bring progressive music to NY failed for many reasons. The festival was great but more important as an idea than for the music which was mostly improv. It wasn't a huge theater just like an old movie house so it was easy to run into Fripp which I did. I later saw Fripp perform with Harry at Bonds Casino. It was an amazing time but the Gomelski crew were not part of the important new music happening. I knew Branca and T-Girls, Static, Ping Pong, etc pretty well, they were older, rather uptight faux academics like Chatham and the polar opposite of the East Village bands like Contortions.
Wonderful interview! Greatly appreciated.
For more on this era, I highly recommend Tom Johnson's book "The Voice of New Music: New York City, 1972-1982" (1989).
This is such an interesting time in the history of music. Two different avant garde music scenes collide with the burgeoning new wave and jazz fusion music scenes to create a totally new type of progressive rock
How interesting that the Manifestival poster features a tromba marina (trumpet marine), a bowed instrument with one string that's played entirely using harmonics.
Definitely seek out Arthur Russell's work. I recommend his album "Another Thought."
Best thing at the Zu festival was T-Girls, I was there. I am not surprised their recording disappeared as those people were really anal about not letting recordings float around. Arsenal sucked, no offense but they did. The reconstructed Gong was just long jams based on old Gong songs with horribly muddy funk bass by Laswell. That attempt by Gomelski to bring progressive music to NY failed for many reasons. The festival was great but more important as an idea than for the music which was mostly improv. It wasn't a huge theater just like an old movie house so it was easy to run into Fripp which I did. I later saw Fripp perform with Harry at Bonds Casino. It was an amazing time but the Gomelski crew were not part of the important new music happening. I knew Branca and T-Girls, Static, Ping Pong, etc pretty well, they were older, rather uptight faux academics like Chatham and the polar opposite of the East Village bands like Contortions.