12 - Red Bull Music Academy Daily

DAILY NOTE
FRIDAY, MAY 17, 2013
12 22
OF
HOUSE IS
A FEELING
THE GOLDEN AGE: PART TWO
STEVE REICH / YOUNG GURU ON JAY-Z'S BIGGEST HIT / MTV
THE DAILY NOTE
LAST NIGHT
And… break! Halftime is over. If there’s one thing
every New Yorker knows, it’s that you sometimes
have to take a breather; this is partly what separates
the professionals from the amateurs. As world-weary
pros, we at Daily Note know that such lulls aren’t
about going limp and giving up, but are rather periods
of active recuperation, an opportunity to discover a
novel way to look at an old idea, to find inspiration
to get a little bit higher, or to gather strength for
whatever comes next. We’ve found time to extend
tales like Michaelangelo Matos’ story of the golden
age of New York house music (we get to the part
where the halcyon days ended with edges frayed by
hard living and harder bureaucrats). We’ve discovered
new strategies to overcome territorial hazards, as
minimalist composer Steve Reich did when he lived
in New York. And we’ll remember to be present (no
autopilot!) for unique experiences such as the ones
that await our Term Two participants (welcome!)
and anybody who will be attending Red Bull Music
Academy events between now and May 31. So, good
people, enjoy the last minutes of your respite and get
ready for more musical overload. Rise and shine!
Clockwise from top: Que Bajo?!
celebrates tropical vibes while
Young Guru looks on at the Red
Bull Culture Clash at Roseland
Ballroom; photo by Anthony
Blasko. Clash winners Trouble
& Bass and Rafael from TMNT
celebrate their victory; Hot
97’s Miss Info hosting Culture
Clash; photos by Christelle de
Castro. Metro Area plays live
at Dark Disco at 88 Palace;
photo by Dan Wilton.
MASTHEAD
Editor in Chief Piotr Orlov
Copy Chief Jane Lerner
Senior Editor Sam Hockley-Smith
Senior Writer/Editor Vivian Host
Contributing Editors Todd L. Burns
Shawn Reynaldo
Staff Writer Olivia Graham
Editorial Coordinator Alex Naidus
Contributors
Sue Apfelbaum
Alice Arnold
Jemal Countess
Adrienne Day
Jan Yannick Elverfeld
Ronen Givony
Creative Director Justin Thomas Kay
for Doubleday & Cartwright
Art Director Christopher Sabatini
Production Designer Suzan Choy
Photo Editor Lorenna Gomez-Sanchez
Staff Photographer Anthony Blasko
Cover Photo Jemal Countess
Joaquin ‘Joe’ Claussell at Body & Soul, NYC 1997
All-Seeing Eye Torsten Schmidt
Little Friends of
Printmaking
Michaelangelo Matos
Tina Paul
Steve Reich
Rob Ricketts
Nick Sylvester
Addendum: Our May 10 feature neglected to credit
photographer Nick Taylor for his image of Gray
performing at Hurrah’s, 1979.
The content of Daily Note does not
necessarily represent the opinions of
Red Bull or Doubleday & Cartwright.
ABOUT RED BULL MUSIC ACADEMY
The Red Bull Music Academy celebrates
creative pioneers and presents fearless new
talent. Now we’re in New York City.
The Red Bull Music Academy is a worldtraveling series of music workshops and
festivals: a platform for those who make a
difference in today’s musical landscape.
This year we’re bringing together two
groups of selected participants — producers,
vocalists, DJs, instrumentalists and
musical mavericks from around the world — in
New York City. For two weeks, each group
will hear lectures by musical luminaries,
work together on tracks, and perform in the
city’s best clubs and music halls. Imagine
2
a place that’s equal parts science lab,
the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and
Kraftwerk’s home studio. Throw in a
touch of downtown New York circa 1981, a
sprinkle of Prince Jammy’s mixing board,
and Bob Moog’s synthesizer collection
all in a 22nd-century remix and you’re
halfway there.
The Academy began back in 1998 and has
been traversing the globe since, traveling
to Berlin, Cape Town, São Paulo, Barcelona,
London, Toronto, and many other places.
Interested? Applications for the 2014 Red
Bull Music Academy open early next year.
3
FROM THE ACADEMY
UPFRONT
“It would be Friday, [and] either the boss wanted
to go on a date, or they wanted to play [the
record] out in the club that night. That’s why they
call it the voodoo art — you’d have to fit 24 minutes
onto one side of a record, get it down to 20
minutes without it skipping.” — Legendary engineer
Herb ‘The Pump’ Powers on mastering, May 10, 2013
UPCOMING
EVENTS
INVITE ONLY
SALTY VS. SWEET
HALL OF FAME
Term Two of Red Bull Music Academy 2013 kicks off with a
free party on Sunday night featuring members of two New
York underground dance-music institutions. Here’s what
you need to know about this particular showdown.
DOPE
JAMS
MISTER SATURDAY
NIGHT
PERSONNEL
Eamon Harkin and Justin Carter
Paul Nickerson and Francis
Englehardt
HISTORY
Record store specializing in dance
music. Sells vinyl, CDs, DVDs, and
clothing, both in the store and through
online mail order.
Opened: January 2006.
Likely date a customer was first
thrown out for haggling/having the
wrong opinion/breathing too loudly:
February 2006.
Dance party since 2009. They
primarily play disco and house;
guests have included Theo Parrish,
Four Tet, Move D, and Optimo.
Smiles firmly enforced, good vibes
ubiquitous.
RESIDENCE
After seven years in Clinton Hill, the
brick-and-mortar operation moved to
the small upstate New York town of
Oak Hill.
House of Yes performance space in
Bushwick, and at various lofts in
Brooklyn. Harkin and Carter also
throw a companion daytime party
on Sundays called—you guessed
it—Mister Sunday, which happens
at Gowanus Grove, along the
pastoral banks of the highly polluted
Gowanus Canal.
if you’re looking to forge a regional identity, one honest approach is to
make a cheesy, low-budget ad, run it 20 times a day on local TV, and never
change it for 20 years.
Take, for example, the commercial for Grand Prospect Hall, which
has haunted New York viewers for decades. Over the screeching strings
of Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons,” Michael and
Alice Halkias promise, “We make your dreams
come true!” in thick Greek accents. The husband-and-wife team are the owners of one of
New York’s most unusual buildings, which has
held a spot in Brooklyn’s heart since the 1890s,
when Brooklyn society would step out of their
opulent Park Slope brownstones to see highbrow vaudeville shows and operas in the gilded
auditorium. The original structure—a four-story 140,000 square-foot “temple of music and
amusement”—was built in 1892 by local developer John Kolle. The building burned down in
December 1900.
Kolle rebuilt it three years later at 263 Prospect Avenue on an even
grander scale—when it reopened it included a bowling alley in the basement, a German-style oak-paneled beer hall, a shooting range, a roof
garden, and at its center, a massive ballroom with 40-foot-high ceilings.
About 80 years later, rap videos would be filmed in that same room, including Foxy Brown’s “Big Bad Mama,” a Cinderella-themed tale wherein
a Lucite stripper slipper is left behind on the steps at midnight. Over
the years, the events held in the building echoed the heartbeat of the
Making disco parties safe for
toddlers and Hasidim.
city: a rally by William Randolph Hearst, the first stop on the national
campaign of the Women’s Suffrage Movement, a mass meeting of more
than 3,500 New Yorkers demanding a subway on Fourth Avenue. (It
appears that complaining about the MTA was already the zeitgeist back
in the 1900s.) Al Capone frequented the Hall’s speakeasy during Prohibition (he reportedly got the nickname “Scarface”
from a scrap at the Hall that left him wounded). Capone also had a reserved balcony box in
the opera house.
The building deteriorated with age until the
Halkias family bought it in 1981, spending 18
years colorfully restoring the interiors and exterior. They stripped the original paint and went
with a chintzy palette of gold leaf and pastel
green and pink, recreated the original molding
in a basement workshop, installed reproductions of Old Master paintings, and salvaged
fixtures like crystal chandeliers from other shuttered event spaces. The result is a sort of Disney-does-Hapsburg one-stop shop for weddings and banquets. In a review
from 2000, Time Out New York offered, “imagine Mozart on ecstasy and
you’ll begin to grasp the outlandishness of this mammoth structure.” Immortalized in the 1986 commercial, Grand Prospect Hall now has a yearlong waitlist to “make your dreams come true.”
On May 25, the Red Bull Music Academy celebrates 12 Years of
DFA Records at Grand Prospect Hall. The revelry has been 110 years in
the making.
-OLIVIA GRAHAM
Scrappy-Doo. Maybe even
Scrappy-Doo singing “Kumbaya.”
Relentlessly optimistic and
chipper. Small in stature, but
determined to win the day.
4
“The party works best when everyone
contributes, and if folks come
prepared, we can go to the moon.
Laugh, dance, whoop, throw your
hands in the air, and introduce
yourself to a stranger. We’ve made so
many great friends over the years at
the Mister. Resist that iPhone for an
evening, especially when you’re on
the dancefloor.”
MAY
20
TAMMANY HALL
BRENMAR
NICK HOOK
SINJIN HAWKE
MORE
MAY
21
KNITTING FACTORY
DRUM MAJORS
MANNIE FRESH
BOI-1DA
YOUNG CHOP
DJ MUSTARD
MORE
MAY
22
SANTOS PARTY HOUSE
UNITED STATES
OF BASS
BIG FREEDIA
AFRIKA BAMBAATAA
EGYPTIAN LOVER
DJ MAGIC MIKE
DJ ASSAULT
DJ FUNK + MANY MORE!
SKREAM
MALA
PLASTICIAN
HATCHA
CHANCE ENCOUNTERS
As the participants of Term Two of Red Bull Music Academy 2013 stream into our city from
all over the world, we asked them to tell us who they’d love to bump into on the streets
of New York. Responses ranged from comedians to DJs to rich benefactors. (In case you were
wondering who Daily Note dreams of running into, it’s Walt ‘Clyde’ Frazier.)
MAY
23
MAY
24
GRAND PROSPECT HALL
12 YEARS MAY
OF DFA
THE WHOLE
LABEL FAMILY ON
FOUR STAGES
REPRESENTATIVE QUOTE
“You have to understand, we are
complete assholes. We are complete
fucking assholes. We know that we’re
assholes and we’re okay with that...
The people that like us are usually
assholes too, or appreciate the fact
that we’re complete assholes, you
know what I mean?”
FIRST EVER
LIVE DJ SET
THE ROOTS
OF DUBSTEP
WOULD-BE MASCOT
The taunting gopher from
Caddyshack. A plucky behind-thescenes troublemaker who drives
everyone crazy but can’t be killed and
therefore commands respect.
GIORGIO
MORODER
SRB BROOKLYN
CLAIM TO FAME
Resident haters. Their famously
acerbic newsletter is as much about
issuing takedowns as highlighting
new releases—they’ve dissed everyone
from techno heavyweights (Carl Craig,
Jus-Ed) to techno journalists (Philip
Sherburne).
19
DEEP SPACE @ OUTPUT
The wild history of Brooklyn’s Grand Prospect Hall.
ILLUSTRATION MERJIN HOS
MAY
MISTER
SATURDAY
NIGHT VS.
DOPE JAMS
25
THE WELL BROOKLYN
THE DOOVER NYC
SPECIAL
KID SMPL
TRANCEMICSOUL
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
Bumping into Louis CK
would be really cool.
I feel like he would be
one of the more humble
and normal celebrities
to interact with in the
city. He could probably
recommend a really dope
diner.
kidsmpl.com
KRAFTMATIKS
ALOE BLACC &
MANY MORE
PETROZAVODSK, RUSSIA
LAGOS, NIGERIA
Antony Hegarty. Have
you seen Shortbus? I
bet Antony could show
me such places.
DJ Premier. Growing up
on his productions, I
wondered how a producer
from Texas and an MC
from Boston carved out
the New York sound of
hip-hop. He created
that standard.
SAINT VITUS
SQUALLOSCOPE
LOVE CULT
PRETORIA, SOUTH AFRICA
VIENNA, AUSTRIA
It has to be DJ Spinna.
I’m a huge fan of Mr.
Williams’ work, be it
hip-hop or house. I just
like the fact that he is
into different kinds of
genres in terms of music
production, [rather]
than being a specialist
in house. That’s my
vision and mission as
well.
A random millionaire
who likes my music so
much that he or she
is willing to pay my
rent for the next few
years just out of plain
niceness.
soundcloud.com/
trancemicsoul
squalloscope.com
lovecult.net
soundcloud.com/
kraftmatiks
ONEOHTRIX
POINT NEVER
EVIAN CHRIST
BILL KOULIGAS
MORE
MAY
26
MAY
26
RECORDED LIVE
FOR RED BULL MUSIC ACADEMY RADIO
TUNE IN AT RBMARADIO.COM
5
TERM TWO PARTICIPANTS
TERM TWO PARTICIPANTS
TERM
TWO
Meet the 31 producers, DJs, vocalists, and
instrumentalists heating up the second
session of Red Bull Music Academy 2013.
SOMEPOE
T.WILLIAMS
SIMONNE
JONES
FINLAND
UK
GERMANY
SOUTH AFRICA
NEW ZEALAND
JAPAN
NETHERLANDS
IRELAND
R&B-laced bass hits
Body-moving house,
garage, and grime
Dramatic electroacoustic anthems
Sensual and jazzy
house
Silky Motown-inspired
soul
Sexoid synth-dream
disco
Visionary bass ’n’
bleep
Electronic island
vibes
soundcloud.com/
twilliamsmusic
@twilliamsmusic
soundcloud.com/simonnejones
@simonnejones
soundcloud.com/
trancemicsoul
@trancemicsoul
louisbaker.co.nz
@louisjbaker
soundcloud.com/nicliu
@nicliumusic
soundcloud.com/krampfhaft
@krampfhaft
soundcloud.com/orquesta
@lanorquesta
EVIAN CHRIST
SINJIN
HAWKE
ANNALOVE
BENJAMIN
DAMAGE
soundcloud.com/somepoe
@somepoe
TRANCEMICSOUL
SQUALLOSCOPE
CARROT
GREEN
MELMANN
MR. SELFISH
JULIAN
CUBILLOS
LOUIS BAKER
PLEASURE
CRUISER
KRAMPFHAFT
ORQUESTA
PICK A PIPER
JULIEN LOVE
KAAN
DÜZARAT
CANADA
AUSTRALIA
TURKEY
AUSTRIA
BRAZIL
ARGENTINA
ITALY
USA
UK
SPAIN
USA
UK
Shamanic dance jams
from Caribou’s drummer
Kebabi disco and curry
house
A warm blanket of
psych, dub, and disco
Singing, songwriting,
storytelling
A rock guitarist jacks
the house
Electro-acoustic
experiments
Split-personality
sound designs
Sunny Californian
indie-pop
Ghostly post-rap and
voodoo R&B
Supremely crafted bass
hybrids
Texan trill wave
Sheer techno weaponry
soundcloud.com/pickapiper
@pickapiper
soundcloud.com/julienlove
@julienlove
soundcloud.com/dzrt
@dzrt
soundcloud.com/squalloscope
@annakohlweis
soundcloud.com/carrotgreen
soundcloud.com/melmann
soundcloud.com/mr_selfish
soundcloud.com/
juliancubillos
@juliancubillos
soundcloud.com/evianchrist
@evian_christ
soundcloud.com/sinjin_hawke
@sinjinhawke
soundcloud.com/annalove
@annalove
soundcloud.com/
benjamindamage
@benjamindamage
LEO ALDREY
SHADOWBOX
KID SMPL
ANDRÉ LAOS
DJ SLOW
SPAIN
USA
USA
SWEDEN
BELGIUM
LAVINA YELB
KRAFTMATIKS
EMUFUCKA
LOVE CULT
DIRG GERNER
DE LA
MONTAGNE
CHILE
NIGERIA
JAPAN
RUSSIA
UK
FRANCE
FOR MORE INFO, GO TO
REDBULLMUSICACADEMY.COM
Way-out synth
phantasms
soundcloud.com/lavina-yelb
6
True hip-hop nonstop
soundcloud.com/kraftmatiks
@kraftmatiks
Boom-blap to the
future
Severely damaged
drone-pop
soundcloud.com/emufucka
@emufucka
lovecult.net
@lov3cult
Wistful blue-eyed soul
Brash, coy electro-pop
soundcloud.com/dirggerner
@dirggerner
soundcloud.com/de-lamontagne
@isdelamontagne
Bleeding-edge sonic
experiments
Haunted electro
miniatures
Rain-soaked ambience
and bass
Classic deep house and
disco
Crunk house meets
future booty
audiobend.com
soundcloud.com/shadowbox4u
@shadowbox4u
soundcloud.com/
kidsimpledubs
@kidsmpl
soundcloud.com/andrelaos
soundcloud.com/djslow
@thedjslow
7
FEATURE
Part 2
YOU BETTER
WORK
Deep inside the dark, tribal world of
NYC house in the ’90s.
WORDS MICHAELANGELO MATOS
Junior Vasquez
at Tunnel, NYC
1995. Photo by Pat
Carroll/NY Daily
News Archive via
Getty Images
8
Chicago gave birth to house music
and London brought it to the world, but
New York City gave it its dimension. House
music was New York City’s ubiquitous afterdark soundtrack throughout the ’90s, and there
was a shade for every taste: rough-and-ready
hip-hop-infused house from Todd Terry, the
thick and funky tribal of Danny Tenaglia,
the soulful earthiness of the Body & Soul camp.
This conglomerate of styles took shape in a
city where creative change is a constant;
it formed the soundtrack for Manhattan’s last
great nightclubbing era.
9
FEATURE
The dancefloor
rises to outer
space, Twilo,
NYC 2000. Photo
by Tina Paul
FEATURE
y the mid-’90s, new york house wasn’t merely established—it was establishment. It’s the difference between no longer having to
explain oneself and beginning to take things for granted. And that was the case
not just in New York, but the world. “You could go to Rome. You could go to
Amsterdam. New York controlled every market,” says Michael Weiss, founder of
one of NYC house’s big ’90s labels, Nervous Records. “You could go to Tokyo and
see stores with huge Nervous posters when you walked in. We were all thriving,
and we all had the major labels calling us all the time to pick up our releases. It
was a very lucrative time.”
Miami was the place outside of town where it all converged. Held in late March
of every year since the mid-’80s, the Winter Music Conference (WMC) was an
annual confab for dance professionals that took place—entirely, at first—around
the Fontainebleau Hotel pool. Initially, says Weiss, “It very much was a major-label thing. Back then, all the major labels had dance divisions, and they were very
actively promoting the DJs. Then, in the early ’90s, once the New York labels got
hot, we really took it over because we had all the big records: Masters At Work,
Todd Terry, Frankie Knuckles, and David Morales were all affiliated with the indies.
[From] ’92 to ’95 was like spring break for the New York dance labels.”
But the dance world was hardly a unified front. A handful of techno DJs
visited WMC for the first time in 1993: Richie Hawtin and John Acquaviva of
Windsor-Detroit’s Plus 8 Records, Dan Bell, Philadelphia’s Nigel Richards, and
future electroclash and EDM star Tommie Sunshine. Joining them was Tampa zine editor and future Astralwerks A&R man Peter Wohelski. “Everyone is
hanging out, passing out records, and then this rave thing starts to pop up,” says
Wohelski. “They don’t want to hear about that at all. I don’t think I’d realized it
was that different. You’d get people who would wander in [to techno showcases]
going, ‘Why are they playing so hard?’”
The principal New York producers of the decade, Masters At Work, could traverse both sides: Louie Vega might drop Plastikman’s Detroit anthem “Spastik”
(as might Junior Vasquez), and plenty of MAW-affiliated tracks banged in warehouses filled with glow-sticky teenagers as well as in the city’s superclubs like
Twilo and Tunnel. Among MAW’s crossover hits were Hardrive’s spare, spooky
diva dub “Deep Inside” (1993) and the Bucketheads’ disco-powered “The Bomb!
(These Sounds Fall Into My Mind),” a record you could not get away from in
1994. Vega guesses this might be because “a lot of those keyboards on those records were more minimal—it was a more naïve sound.”
Masters At Work eventually pursued a classicist direction as Nuyorican Soul,
whose 1997 album featured guest appearances from salsa giant Tito Puente,
Salsoul vibes player Vince Montana, and jazz guitarist George Benson. And for
many others, house music’s (not to mention techno’s) increasingly abstract, increasingly instrumental direction was beginning to chafe. “Everywhere I go,
all I hear is house music,” Timmy Regisford, founder and resident of the club
Shelter, complained in 1995. “I don’t hear no lyrics or songs and it’s the same
everywhere that I go—I may hear two songs in an hour and a half, but that’s not
satisfactory.” The same year, disco-era DJ vets François Kevorkian and Danny
Krivit joined with the younger but equally classic-minded Joe Claussell to start
Body & Soul at Tribeca’s Vinyl (formerly Area), where soulful vocals were the
order of the day.
Techno snuck in here and there—usually played way more slowly than usual.
That’s how Danny Krivit played the Aztec Mystic’s “Jaguar,” an Underground
Resistance track from 1999. Krivit told the Village Voice that he’d play it “pitched
down as far as the turntable goes. I remember going to play it and the DJ put
it back all the way—‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘That’s how I play this record.’
‘Really? Oh, you’re losing all the energy.’ ‘No, you’re gonna lose all the soul.’” At
WMC ’93, Wohelski and his crew caught Tony Humphries at Miami’s Warsaw,
where he wowed them by pitching Jaydee’s huge rave hit “Plastic Dreams” (1992)
to -6. “We all were like, ‘Holy shit! This is crazy,’” he says, given that most rave
DJs were bumping “Plastic Dreams” up to +2.
Eventually, techno kids became house heads, and the same demographic shift
that existed between house (older, prominently African-American and Latino)
and techno (younger, whiter) would show up in the New York house scene. Larry
Tee finished an eclectic three-year residency at the Roxy in 1994; the club then
switched, he says, to “a tribal, instrumental vibe. It went distinctly muscle-man.”
Author Frank Owen adds, “House music lost its black audience and gained a big
white audience [when] it became instrumental. Vocal house was very much in
tune with that tradition of R&B, of the church. That was all jettisoned.”
The DJ who signaled the change most clearly in New York was Junior
Vasquez. Born Donald Mattern in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Vasquez had been a
Paradise Garage head whose audience shifted from Garage habitués to Chelsea
boys, with ravers eventually getting on board. Vasquez was famed for his residency at the Sound Factory from 1989 to 1995. His sound, says Time Out’s Bruce
Tantum, “was more jacking—not Chicago-jacking, but the New York style, more
bottom-heavy. The sounds are a bit more rounded. [It was] Latin, but subdued
Latin, very minimalist in a way, [but a] big sound, with throbbing, drum-heavy,
deep male vocals saying stupid things. It was gay, but not exclusively gay.”
(cont'd on pg. 14)
10
11
CENTERFOLD
FEATURE
FEATURE
L-R: François
Kevorkian,
Joaquin ‘Joe’
Claussell, and
Danny Krivit of
Body & Soul.
Vasquez was also cultivating a mystique,
locked away inside a DJ booth clubgoers
could hardly see into. “It made him more
godlike—[a] word-being-handed-downfrom-up-high sort of deal,” says Tantum.
Vasquez was also notoriously snappish,
an attitude that carried over to his music,
most famously on 1996’s “If Madonna
Calls”—its one-line lyrical hook goes,
“If Madonna calls, I’m not heah.” It’s as
purely New York a record as anything by
the Ramones.
14
month. “New York was always a hard place to get your foot in the door,” says Digweed. “Then Sasha and I did a mini-tour of the States in 1996. New York was one of
the dates, at Twilo. The night went incredibly well and the owners came to us both
with the idea of playing each month. That night went on to last five years.”
“Not only did that put them on the map, it put Twilo on the international
clubbing map,” says Tantum. “It was, rather unfortunately, the first place that I
saw people just standing and facing the DJ booth—maybe moving around a little
bit, but not dancing with each other, certainly. They were just looking at the guy
playing the records.”
Sasha and Digweed played marathon sets, splitting the work—but Vasquez and
his main rival, Danny Tenaglia, were prone to playing up to 18 hours a shot, all by
themselves. Like Vasquez, Tenaglia was a Garage regular and Larry Levan acolyte.
“People feel the need to compare us, like Coke to Pepsi,” Tenaglia told DJ Times in
1998 about Vasquez. “I feel there’s nothing to compare. What we do is 90 percent
different from each other.”
Bottom: Crowd at
the Sound Factory,
NYC 1990. Photo by
Alice Arnold
IMAGE OF BODY & SOUL COURTESY OF BODYANDSOUL-NYC.COM
“Junior was a magician during his period at Palladium,” says Tee of the 14th
Street palace where Vasquez played from September 1996 to September 1997.
“He would do some things that were absolutely astounding. It was a little after,
when they brought him back to Twilo, that it turned awful. After crystal meth
hit the clubs, [Vasquez’s] sound totally didn’t change. It just became nonstop,
one sound.”
Junior’s return to Twilo in 1997 was a homecoming: it was in the same space as
the Sound Factory. Junior took Saturday nights. The other nights’ lineups filled up—
often with overseas guests. “That was the first big club to do that on a regular basis
in New York,” says Tantum. “Twilo introduced the concept of worshipping DJs from
Europe much more than DJs from the US. The New York DJs were no longer getting
these high-paying gigs—they were going to Europe to get paid a lot of money. On the
plus side, it brought a lot of fresh blood into the clubbing scene.”
The big names were the British progressive-house tag-team DJ duo Sasha and
John Digweed, whom Twilo hired in 1996 to commandeer the last Friday of every
Top: (L-R) Peter
Daou, unidentified
man, Vanessa Daou,
Daphne Rubin-Vega,
Danny Tenaglia at
the Sound Factory
Bar, NYC 1994.
Photo by Tina Paul
FEATURE
FEATURE
Left: Michael
Alig’s birthday
party at
Disco 2000 at
Limelight, NYC
1994. Opposite:
Respect Is
Burning party at
Twilo, NYC 1999.
Photos by Tina
Paul
NEW YORK
IN THE HOUSE
IN THE 1990S, THE CLUBLAND THAT NEVER SLEPT
WAS WORKING OVERTIME. AND SO WERE THE NEW
YORK PRODUCERS AND DJS WHO CONTRIBUTED TO
THE ONGOING GLOBAL HOUSE BOOM. THOUGH THE
VOLUME AND DIVERSITY OF GREAT NYC ’90S TRACKS
IS A BOOK IN ITSELF, HERE ARE A FEW UNDERGROUND
TOUCHSTONES THAT APPEARED ON EITHER THE POP
CHARTS OR BECAME CLUB STANDARDS.
MK, “BURNING (VIBE MIX)”
(AREA 10, 1991) With its
As Vasquez’s style grew more brittle, Tenaglia went deeper—without necessarily retreating into deep house. His style was dubbed “tribal.” “It all coalesced
for Danny at the tail end of the Sound Factory, when Danny was playing there
in ’93,” says Tantum. “Danny really found his sound around ’94 and ’95. The best
tribal is either his, or sounds like it could be him: a bassline, a big thick kick
drum, a few funny sound effects going on here and there, and that would be it.
It would fill the room. It was a big production. I’m not sure what the trick was,
but he knew the trick.”
As the ’90s progressed, Tenaglia began drawing from techno as well—the dubbier side of acts such as Germany’s Maurizio, stuff that was “house” without concerning itself too much with diva (or, in Larry Tee’s derisive term, “church lady”)
vocals. “The minimal stuff, the Maurizio stuff he was influenced by—there was a
lot of darkness to it, a sexy darkness,” says Kerri Mason, a journalist who in the
early 2000s cashiered Tenaglia’s nights at the Tribeca juice-bar Vinyl.
“There was an old guard—the keepers of the flame of house music,” says Mason. “But they were in short supply in the beginning, because they resented
[Tenaglia]. He had the Paradise Garage pedigree, but he was almost disavowing
it. He was playing trance, techno—all this weird music that they had no cul-
16
tural connection to.” Still, Tenaglia’s young, white audience wasn’t particularly
ravey. “It wasn’t a super-ecstasy kind of crowd,” says Mason. “There were no glow
sticks. That was seriously frowned upon.”
There were other ways to frown. Around 1997, when Vasquez moved from
the Tunnel to Twilo and Tenaglia took over at the Tunnel, the two conducted a
public feud. Word got around that Junior, spotting Danny from the DJ booth,
had him physically removed by security. Actually, Tenaglia told DJ Times, he
was approached by a security staffer who apologetically asked him to go, which
he did—then he decided to take it public: “Even before it happened to me I was
looking at how wrong it was. You don’t treat people like that.”
Rough treatment in clubs would become the norm in the late ’90s, though.
The city was remaking itself from the bottom up. Gone were the days when,
as Owen recalls, you could tip your cabbie in cocaine and police were almost
nonexistent on the street. Times Square was doing major business with the Walt
Disney Company, the closest that place had been to anything resembling Mickey
Mouse since the opening of animator Ralph Bakshi’s X-rated Fritz the Cat in
1972. The seedier aspects of nightlife in New York, long able to run free, were
undergoing a crackdown.
It began with Peter Gatien’s spots: Club U.S.A., Limelight, the Tunnel, and
Palladium. All four rooms were enormous—Club U.S.A., the smallest, held 2,500;
the Tunnel, a city-block long, held 5,000. Though everyone who worked for him
averred that Gatien’s hands were uninvolved in any dealing going on in his clubs,
drugs were so prevalent at Limelight that the venue’s most visible promoter,
Michael Alig, would joke about it—loudly.
“Six months before the Limelight shut down, I was on a balcony with Gatien
saying, ‘This cannot go on. The police are going to crack down on you,’” says
Owen. “It was not something that came out of the blue. It was entirely predictable. You certainly don’t fill a club with 3,000 people, many of them underage
and so fucked up on drugs that they’re collapsed on the floor, and then go to the
press, like Michael Alig did, and start boasting about celebrity drug dealers. It
was inevitable that was going to happen.”
On September 30, 1995, 50 NYPD officers raided Limelight, making only three
arrests, including a busboy who sold weed on the side. A cop with ties to the club
had tipped them off. “They told all the ecstasy dealers. Nobody was there that
night,” says Owen. The Office of Special Narcotics, intending to nab ten times
as many people as it did, was livid. The Limelight reopened a week after the
bust, but by then it had lost its luster. “It was really dead by that time,” says Tee,
“because everybody knew the drugs weren’t going to be there. If there were no
drugs, the crowd wasn’t going to be there.”
After Limelight was shuttered in 1997—following Alig’s 1996 murder of Angel
Melendez, a fellow Club Kid—many figured the cops would leave nightclubbers
alone again. But things ramped up. “You would endure a search that would be
extreme even in a prison environment,” says former New York magazine reporter Ethan Brown. “I actually work in prisons now; I know what a prison search
is like. Your shoes had to be removed. They would actually put their hands in
your underwear. They would sometimes open your mouth. It was just crazy and
humiliating. If someone might be suspected of putting ecstasy in [his or her]
mouth, that person would then be grabbed by the shoulders and picked up and
literally, physically thrown out of the club.”
It wasn’t the Gestapo—nor, as Owen points out, was it anything compared to
the treatment gays endured in the days before Stonewall. But it was unsettling,
and not the only evidence nightlife was shrinking in Manhattan. The early ’90s
vogue for sit-down lounges, such as Spy, had introduced a queasy new concept
into nightlife: bottle service. “They were small places, initially,” says Owen. Club
owners started doing the math. “You’re not going to make a fortune if you have
100, 200 people in there,” Owen continues. “Promoters said, ‘Why don’t we do this
in a bigger club, and we’ll make a fucking killing here? We can sell a $30 bottle
of vodka for $500. Why pay Michael Alig and the Club Kids to come, all the problems they bring, all the drugs?’ It was a no-brainer from a business point of view.”
The last real superclub that remained in New York was Twilo, which went
away permanently on May 24, 2001, after the state voted to allow the City of New
York to not renew the venue’s cabaret license. Authorities had discovered the
club was sending overdosers to the hospital in its own specially hired paramedics
service—so as not to alert the police—after first attempting to revive them with
ice water in a private back room. The day the club shut down, fans conducted a
vigil. “Flowers and candles littered the sidewalk, handwritten screeds and love
letters for the lost friend covered the door,” wrote Tricia Romano in the Village
Voice. “People gathered around and took photos, hugging each other and bidding
farewell. A few cried, and some danced to the music booming from a silver car
parked at the curb.”
The action was moving fast to Brooklyn—particularly Williamsburg—and the
sound moved away from tribal and progressive-house bloat to electro, mash-ups,
and a surge of minimal techno from Germany—a change exacerbated by September 11. “You couldn’t have a Vinyl now, with the rents the way they are in New
York—no liquor, a $10 cover, open three nights a week. It would never work,”
says Mason. “There was such an automatic and complete decrease in attendance
across the board that you had to start thinking in terms of efficiency, which clubs
never did. After 9/11, it became survival of the fittest.”
Additional thanks: Boyd Jarvis.
chiming melodies, swinging
rhythms, and diva vocals,
“Burning” is a potent example
of how Detroit native Marc
Kinchen helped shape New
York’s house and club sound
after relocating here in the
early ’90s.
PHOTON, INC., “GENERATE
POWER (WILD PITCH MIX)”
(Strictly Rhythm, 1991)
A jazzy horn blast and Paula
Brion’s voice anchor this
cut, both great examples of
the loopy Wild Pitch sound
DJ Pierre developed in New
York, and the dancefloor
power of early Strictly Rhythm
releases.
EVERYTHING BUT THE GIRL,
“MISSING (TODD TERRY
CLUB REMIX)” (Blanco Y
Negro/Atlantic, 1994) Though
Terry’s roots were in hiphop he played a key role
in creating the short-lived
hip-house sound Todd’s silky
transformation of the pensive
“Missing” was his pop moment,
a worldwide hit, and arguably
his most enduring work.
BARBARA TUCKER, “BEAUTIFUL
PEOPLE (UNDERGROUND
NETWORK MIX)” (Strictly
Rhythm, 1994) Another gem
from the Masters At Work
camp, “People” is a blueprint
for NYC house anthem-isms,
with Barbara Tucker’s gospel
vocals paying tribute to inner
spirituality, while Kenny and
Louie’s mix blends the tracky
(beats) and the sweeping
(strings).
DANNY TENAGLIA & CELEDA,
“MUSIC IS THE ANSWER”
(Twisted America, 1998)
Released as he made his
move from Twilo to Tunnel,
this stripped-down tune
needed little more than
its unforgettable (and oftbootlegged) vocal hook to
propel the smiling DJ to the
charts.
ARMAND VAN HELDEN FEAT.
ROLAND CLARK, “FLOWERZ”
(Armed, 1999) Years after
“Witchdokta” and years before
Duck Sauce (his A-Trak
collabo), the most manicured
beard in dance music closed
out the ’90s with this
cocktail of walking disco
basslines topped with a float
of Clark’s soulful vocals.
17
FROM THE ARCHIVES
Q&A
YOUNG GURU
Roc-A-Fella’s studio genius gets into the Empire State of mind.
PHOTOGRAPHY DAN WILTON
So you are Jay-Z’s personal… You describe it. I am Jay-Z’s
personal engineer, but my job encompasses so much more than
that. I say I’m in charge of the sound of Jay-Z, engineering-wise,
[and] mixing on certain records. But a lot of times I’m the guy
choosing who’s mixing his records. I’m the guy who’s holding all
of his music, so his whole career sits on hard drives in safes in my
house. I’ve been doing that for him basically since 1999. That also
entails the rest when we had Roc-A-Fella, and now Roc Nation.
It’s an interesting job and he’s an interesting person, and as he
grows and matures all of our lives are affected by that. It just
keeps getting bigger and bigger. I always look at him and think,
“How much further can it go?” It’s a beautiful experience.
Can you talk a bit about the process of being in the studio?
You’ve talked in the past about going in and doing extensive work on a sample or having to isolate the frequencies.
When I go around now and talk to people who are interested
in audio, there’s so much you can do with the music. There are
so many plug-ins, so many ways you can affect music, that people start putting things on just because. Sometimes you need
to step back and listen to the purity of the music. A record by
Cam’ron called “Oh Boy” is one of the proudest mixes that I
have done because there’s absolutely nothing extra on it. There’s
maybe one reverb and everything else is the SSL; I’m pulling
up faders, I start messing with stuff, and I’m like, “This sounds
great.” They’re not over-rapping on the song. It’s not super deep.
It’s just a fun song. That’s what music is sometimes.
I’ve heard Just Blaze tell the story that he didn’t even deliver a final version of “Oh Boy” and it was already on the
radio. If you listen intently, Cam says my name in the song; he
says, “Guru start popping ’em.” The reason for that is Just Blaze
had made this beat for Jay-Z. Cam had actually asked for this
beat months before he did the song. Blaze just said, “This beat
is for Jay,” and Cam left it alone. Months later Jay still didn’t use
the beat. Jay might take two of them and pass the rest around
to whoever was in the studio. It was like a factory, that’s how we
kept going. This beat was still laying around and then one day
Cam came in and said, “Put that beat up. I’m gonna make a record to this beat.” The “boy” sample wasn’t running through the
whole song, so he had me loop it. That was Cam’s way of locking
in this record, of saying, “This is my record.”
It was probably about 3pm when we got done with it, and
Cam’ron said, “Guru, put a rough mix on it. Just make it good
enough that people can hear it.” Every day in New York City
at 5pm, DJ Enuff has a “free ride” on Hot 97 where he can basically play whatever record he wants with no programming.
It’s one of the only open formats left in New York City. So Cam
took the record, went to Hot 97, and had Enuff play the record.
18
You make the record at three and it’s on the radio at five! But
he did that to claim the record. It was dope and it introduced
[Juelz] Santana to people who didn’t know him. Cam was already hot but it shot him to real serious superstar status.
Did you engineer “Empire State of Mind”? I didn’t mix it.
I recorded it and I gave it away to Duro, who’s another great
engineer here in New York City. When I first came to New
York there were no young black engineers, so Duro’s the person I look to; I follow his career. Needless to say, he’s another guy who I trust, so I had to reach out. “Okay, I have this
great song called ‘Empire State of Mind’ and I need you to mix
this record. I was gonna mix it but now I have to change all
these things.” That way I could relax. And I know he’ll do a
great job with it; I don’t have to be over his shoulder. That’s
when it leaves just being an engineer and becomes sort of
A&R mode. You’re doing whatever’s necessary to get the
record finished.
Our studio [in the mid-’00s] was Baseline Studios in New
York. Baseline was key to the magic we created. That place had
just been built so we consolidated instead of jumping around all
these different studios. When you have the ability to have your
own room you can get comfortable, and you know the sound
of that room, it makes work flow so much faster. I always say
the best music comes from small groups of people working out
of the same room. With hip-hop music, the majority of people
that dominated and had runs—from Bad Boy to Death Row,
from Roc-A-Fella to Murder Inc.—were a small group of people in one place. And that’s what we got when everything came
out of Baseline.
“Empire State of Mind” was probably Jay’s biggest commercial tune, right? Yes, definitely. That was his first number
one on crossover. I can have a number one on the R&B/urban
charts, but this is the first one that was number one on every
chart. It played on Z100 and Hot 97 at the same time. For those
who don’t know, that’s [New York’s] super-pop station versus
our super-urban station.
Pre-hype and buzz, was there a general feeling that the
track was going to be big? There was, but again I have to
analyze things. The song was called “Empire State of Mind.”
So it wasn’t about whether it was good or not—I was thinking, “Am I alienating people who aren’t from New York?” The
guy that handles Jay’s publishing brought us that record; the
girls who wrote it have the same publisher. Long story short,
they brought us this record and I got a hit. They actually had
a version where the girls did it as a complete R&B song. So
this was smart on the publisher’s part—he went to them and
said, “Look, if you put out this record… It’s a great song, it’ll
probably do some things for your career. Or you could let me
give this record to Jay-Z, and I guarantee at the end of this
year you’ll buy a house.” Being very smart women, they left
the hook and took the vocals out. The perspective of the record
was really a “coming to New York” story: “I’m from a small
town. I want to make it in the music business. I’m gonna take
that trip to New York.” I wanted to keep that same perspective
’cause that’s my story, I totally related to that. This is sort of
our hip-hop version of “New York, New York,” where Frank
Sinatra had this huge record that would go on to forever represent the city.
Regional pride is hot. Yeah, it’s hot, but the record transcended that. It became this anthem for New York City, but it also
became this anthem of “making it.” That was my question: it
wasn’t about the quality of the record, it was, “Are people from
outside New York gonna allow this to be accepted? Am I alienating somebody on the West Coast?” There was another song
a while ago called “Deja Vu (Uptown Baby)” [by Lord Tariq &
Peter Gunz] that became this huge New York record. But it was
so big that it needed to spread to other cities and they actually
went back and changed who they were shouting out. They made
versions for every single region, ’cause you’re not gonna get that
response in Texas if you’re shouting out Harlem. We didn’t have
to do that, but yes, I was concerned about this record being big
all over the world. And it ended up being a huge record.
Interviewed by Jeff ‘Chairman’ Mao at Red Bull
Music Academy Madrid 2011. For the full Q&A, head to
redbullmusicacademy.com/lectures.
19
COLUMNS
COLUMNS
LANDMARKS
A column on
the gear and
processes that inform
the music we make.
LEONARDO ALDREY , a Red Bull Music Academy
2013 participant, is a composer based in Barcelona. He’s interested in interfaces: the tools and
systems people use to make sounds, and how
those interfaces determine the kinds of music we
can make. Right now he is working on something
called Tonal Pizza, in which he reimagines the gestures people use to make music, from the one-toone relationship of pressing down a piano key to
things both more intuitive and abstract.
RBMA: What is Tonal Pizza?
LO G O S
The origins of
iconic images from
NYC's musical history
explained.
mtv, the first 24-hour music-video
network, launched on August 1, 1981,
revolutionizing both music and television.
The brand image that emerged with this
brave new visual world was as radical as what
it represented. Well before Google Doodles
and GIFs, founding MTV creative director
Fred Seibert flouted “good” logo-design
standards when he lobbied for Manhattan
Design’s block-lettered M and spray-painted
T-V—and its concept of mutability—helping
establish the channel’s personality as young,
rebellious, and unpredictable.
Despite pressure to work with big-name
designers, Seibert favored the unknown
firm—it was cofounded by his childhood
friend Frank Olinsky. Seibert and Olinsky
grew up together in Huntington, Long
Island, and Seibert credits Olinsky with
turning him onto music and the revelation
that cartoons are made by people. “My father
was an animator and commercial artist, and
he taught me how to use the tools of the
trade,” says Olinsky.
Manhattan Design had a tiny shop in
the back of a t’ai chi studio above Bigelow
Pharmacy in Greenwich Village; it was there,
20
after more than eight months of work—
and long before the MTV name had even
been decided upon—that Olinsky posted a
prototype of that logo on the wall. He cites
being inspired by punk, graffiti, and an
animated children’s show from his youth,
Winky Dink and You, which invited home
audiences to complete scenes by drawing
on clear plastic sheets draped over the front
of their TV sets. The epiphany to make
something that vandalized the establishment
and could be morphed in countless ways
turned out to be right for the time and the
medium. “Most logos are designed by print
designers and then motion designers have to
figure out how to move them,” says Seibert.
“That strikes me as kind of stupid.”
The corporate types at the channel hated
everything about it, says Seibert, but accepted
it with the words “Music Television” added
beneath it in Helvetica—ironically, that part
got hacked when the network redesigned the
logo in 2010. That it endured almost 30 years
is a testament to its early premise. As Olinsky
observes, “The idea was that nobody really
owns this, which is, in a traditional sense,
very anti-logo thinking.”
-SUE APFELBAUM
Leonardo Aldrey: Tonal Pizza is the name that my
housemates gave to my project with a more nerdy title: “Computer-assisted interactive system for tonal
navigation in real time.” It’s a software-based system
that processes data from different kinds of sensors
using principles of tonality to transform gestures
into music. When I told my friend that the graphical representation consists of a circle with different
radii and “slices” that work as a selector of “tonal ingredients,” he said, “Okay, it’s like a tonal pizza.”
RBMA: What inspired it?
LA: Two ideas: playing music at a higher abstraction level than one-to-one control over pitch and
volume, and collaborative music performance. I’m
interested in the “grammars of music,” how chords
and scales have different tendencies to move in
certain directions and how they relate to the sensations of tension and relaxation in music. RBMA: Is the idea to give up control?
LA: Ha ha! I’m not sure if I’m ready to give up control either. The idea is not to completely give up
control but rather to make musical decisions at a
different level of abstraction. There is still control
but over macro-structures; the micro-control is left
to the software.
DAPTONE
RECORDS
THE BRONX
The places, spaces,
and monuments of
NYC's musical past,
present, and future.
i f y o u a s k n e a l s u g a r m a n , saxophonist and
co-owner of the Daptone record label, to describe their
Bushwick headquarters, he might use words like “homey” and “low-key.” Indeed, this mud-colored, two-family
row house looks more like a flophouse than a recording
studio and label office, especially when contrasted with
the new steel-and-glass condos across the street.
Yet this modest building has produced some massive
records, such as Amy Winehouse’s 2006 Grammy-winning Back to Black album. More recently, major-label
artists including Michael Bublé, Chris Rock, and Bruno
Mars have used the Daptone facilities to record songs
like Mars’ hit single “Locked Out of Heaven.” Otherwise,
the label largely skews local, with Brooklyn-bred artists
like Sharon Jones and Charles Bradley on the roster.
Daptone’s lo-fi approach—literally splicing and editing tape with razor blades—gives their soul, funk,
gospel, and afrobeat records a trademark veneer, as if
they’ve been aged to perfection in a cask. “Most of our
recordings are done on an old Ampex eight-track machine,” says Sugarman. “We want it to sound like we’re
not in a recording studio. The [room] doesn’t get in the
way of the sound of the record.”
The Daptone story starts in 1998, when Sugarman’s
future business partner, Gabriel Roth, had a recording
studio in the basement of afrobeat supergroup Antibalas’ space in Williamsburg. They formally founded
the label in 2001, and its first two releases—Sharon
Jones and the Dap-Kings’ Dap-Dippin’ with Sharon
Jones and the Dap-Kings and the Sugarman 3’s Pure
Cane Sugar—were recorded there. But that neighborhood was gentrifying quickly and when their rent
spiked, Sugarman and Roth moved all of the equipment to Sugarman’s apartment. Eventually they found
a building in Bushwick and renovated it with the sweat
equity of their artists and friends.
Despite their far-flung locale, fans still find them.
“People walk up, knock on the door and say, ‘I’m from
France, I love your records, can I have a tour of the studio?’ says Sugarman. “Which is really flattering and very
cool for us.” Daptone staffers frequently oblige, even
though the place is in a state of perpetual renovation.
“It’s not a beautiful space, but it’s home.” -ADRIENNE DAY
PAST FEATURED LANDMARKS
1 MAX NEUHAUS’ “TIMES SQUARE”
2 THE THING SECONDHAND STORE
3 THE LOFT
4 MARCY HOTEL
5 ANDY WARHOL’S FACTORY
6 QUEENSBRIDGE HOUSES
1
7
7 RECORD MART
8 DEITCH PROJECTS
6
5
8
5
9 AREA/SHELTER/VINYL
7
10 STUDIO B
QUEENS
5
11 MARKET HOTEL
2
9 8
10
3
8
MANHATTAN
4
11
WHAT: DAPTONE RECORDS
WHERE: 340 GRAND
STREET; 115 TROUTMAN
STREET, BROOKLYN
WHY: OLD-SCHOOL SOUL
MADE NEW
WHEN: 2001-PRESENT
STATEN ISLAND
BROOKLYN
RBMA: What pieces of software and hardware
technology are involved?
LA: The software is a patch of Max for Live that
I use inside Ableton Live. For the data input, the
idea is to be able to use any kind of sensor (Nintendo Wii, camera, electronic drums, Phidgets, etc).
At the moment, the graphical representation is implemented through a Wacom tablet.
RBMA: Tonal Pizza has multiuser capabilities.
How does that work?
LA: The idea of the Tonal Pizza as a multiuser
instrument consists of a group of “performers”
generating data though different sensors, and a
“conductor” who uses the graphical representation
to determine at each moment the tonal context in
which the performance will happen.
RBMA: Do you have plans for turning the interface into a larger-scale consumer product?
LA: I’m currently studying new concepts of harmony that I want to include in the system. I would
love to make installations with it. TOP
5…
RADICAL
PROGRAMMERS
PRESENTED BY
Today, the art of pairing music from seemingly dissimilar genres and sound worlds is known,
pseudo-scientifically, as “programming.” But in
the recent (and more humble) past, it was more
simply called booking a good show. Here are five
New York City musical impresarios and venues (out
of many) that inspired Ronen Givony’s Wordless
Music series. Wordless Music (wordlessmusic.org)
brings together artists from the worlds of socalled classical, electronic, and rock music.
1 2 3 4 5
PIERRE BOULEZ
In 1973, Boulez removed the seats of
Avery Fisher Hall in
favor of red rugs and
foam cushions on the
floor. The New York
Philharmonic played
Bach, Stockhausen,
Ives, Stravinsky,
and George Crumb; top
price was $3.50. The
comparison to today
is too depressing to
think about.
BILL GRAHAM AT
FILLMORE EAST
Miles Davis opening
for Neil Young. Jimi
Hendrix and the Voices of East Harlem.
John Lennon and Frank
Zappa. The Who and
Chuck Berry. Fleetwood Mac and Van Morrison. The Beach Boys
and Creedence (!).
Ruthlessness and generosity embodied.
JOSHUA RIFKIN
This conductor and
scholar first argued
that Bach’s great
works for choir were
written for one part
per voice. In his
spare time, he also
re-orchestrated the
music of the Beatles
for The Baroque
Beatles Book (1965),
and revived the reputation of Scott Joplin with his recording of Joplin’s piano
rags.
ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK
Prior to visiting the US in 1892,
Dvořák had never met
a person of color. He
soon came to consider
slave songs, Indian
music, and spirituals “the future music
of this country”; he
would incorporate
these ideas into his
“New World” Symphony,
written partly while
living at 327 E. 17th
Street.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Ravi Shankar and the
Ramones. Dolly Parton, Bruce Springsteen, Lou Reed,
Patti Smith, Aaron
Copland, Nina Simone,
Charles Mingus, and
Prince. Anthony Braxton and Messiaen’s
“Quartet for the End
of Time.” The club
closed in 2004, and
is currently the home
of (what else?) the
NYU School of
Business.
-NICK SYLVESTER
21
NEW YORK STORY
NEW YORK STORY
CITY LIFE
Composer Steve Reich on how
NYC has shaped his work.
WORDS STEVE REICH (AS TOLD TO RONEN GIVONY)
ILLUSTRATION LITTLE FRIENDS OF PRINTMAKING
Like George Gershwin, John Cage, and his hero John Coltrane,
Steve Reich and his music are synonymous with New York. Born and educated
in the city, Reich moved briefly to the Bay Area in the early 1960s,
where he worked with Luciano Berio, Terry Riley, and Phil Lesh, among
others, before returning to New York in 1965. Reich’s 1994 work City Life can
be described as a New Yorker’s ambivalent ode to his hometown—much like
Gil Scott-Heron’s “New York Is Killing Me,” but scored for oboes, clarinets,
percussion, pianos, string quartet, and samplers. Few works of music capture
the pace and mood of life in New York as successfully.
new york is so ingrained in my biography that if you took it away, I wouldn’t
have a biography.
New York [has been] central to my musical development from the age of
14 when I went to Birdland, where I had the opportunity to hear Miles Davis
and Kenny Clarke and all the other great bebop stars. I heard Igor Stravinsky
conduct for the first time in my life at Carnegie Hall on a Sunday when I was
14 or 15. New York is the home of the Juilliard School of Music, where I went
to get a large part of my musical education—and while I was doing that, at
night I was going to the Five Spot and other places to hear John Coltrane and
Thelonious Monk. I heard Luciano Berio—who was then a visiting composer—
give a concert at the New School in the Village while I was at Juilliard. I heard
the premieres of the Elliott Carter quartets, which shook a lot of people up.
I played in Carnegie Hall for the very first time with Michael Tilson Thomas
back in 1973, and I’ve given three sold-out one-man concerts in the big hall at
Carnegie after that. Carnegie Hall is a central part of where I’ve presented my
music. Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Museum of Modern Art, and Town
Hall are the three locations where [my 1971 piece] Drumming had its world
premiere. I wanted to reach these three very different types of cultural centers.
[I stayed in New York because] well, music is a social art. If you want to be
involved with music, you’ve got to be around other musicians. Especially someone like myself—a touring musician who had his own ensemble for 40 years,
from 1966 to 2006—being around where there’s a community of musicians is
your lifeblood. And being around other composers who are doing things, being
where the action is... you thrive on finding out what’s going on around you, and
trying to deal with it—absorbing it and responding to it. If you live in isolation
I think that’s a real disadvantage for any artist, but particularly for a composer
because it is a social art.
Starting in about 1985 until 2006, when [my wife Beryl Korot and I] left the
city, I walked around every day on the street with earplugs. I would not go out
without earplugs. And that’s an odd way to live, but I found it necessary. City
Life is definitely not An American in Paris. It’s not a celebration of New York.
It’s taking the sounds that I really dislike—screeching cars and air brakes and
car alarms, all the abrasive qualities to the city—and trying to deal with that.
[With City Life] one of the main motivating musical factors was to [have]
pre-recorded sounds played [by a live player]. The inspiration was really looking at the use of samplers, not as I had used them before [on Different Trains
and The Cave] but as they were used in rock and as they were used in popular
music. So that’s exactly it. There are two pianists in City Life, and there are two
sampler players. The third movement in particular is like reconstructing one
of my early pieces, It’s Gonna Rain or Come Out, to be played live.
Part of the inspiration for City Life really came out of my studies with Luciano Berio. He has a piece called Circles which is a setting of three E.E. Cummings poems. Berio understood Cummings better than most of the people
back in the ’50s and ’60s. The piece starts with the word “stinging”—[Berio’s]
wife, the great singer Cathy Berberian, prolongs the S, and while she’s holding
out that S, Berio has sandpaper blocks come in. When I first heard the piece, I
thought, “Wow, you have an instrument imitating the phonemes, the sound of
the speech.” And that is happening throughout City Life. That kind of thinking
is something that I picked up from Berio and never applied as literally as I do
in City Life.
After City Life came out on recording, I got a postcard from Germany in
1990-something-or-other. The guy wrote on top: “Can’t take no mo’/Take no
mo’/Techno!” I mean, I couldn’t name one techno artist then or now really, but
22
when things are in the air, they’re in the air. Tape loops were in the air back in
the 1960s when I got involved with that. Then a lot of people like Brian Eno—
and, later, the techno artists that were one or two generations after Eno—got
involved in computer music, and turntable uses of the same thing. This is
something that has been in the air now for 40, 50, 60 years, and it just keeps
transmogrifying into different applications, different ways of dealing with the
fact that you can take something that somebody said and turn it into music in
lots of different ways; you can do it in live performance, and that indeed was
the focus of City Life.
My ensemble was started in New York. All our rehearsals were held at the
loft that we lived in on Warren Street for many years and, before that, in a loft
on Broadway near Canal.
There’s no question that things have changed. I moved back from the West
Coast in 1965, and the first loft that I got—the first place where I could play
music late at night without bothering people—was on Duane Street between
Hudson and Greenwich. And I paid $65 a month. I remember [dancer and
choreographer] Yvonne Rainer gave me a lift home—I don’t know how she had
a car, but she did and she was living in Soho—and she said, “Do people live
down here?” And this is Yvonne Rainer! And I said, “Not many, but I’m down
here, and it’s quiet and it’s cheap.” Because back then, Soho was “civilization”
for artists. That very same street now, Martin Scorsese lives a few doors up
from where I lived, and I seriously doubt that he’s paying $65 a month in rent.
What I hear is, Brooklyn is almost finished. Williamsburg is unbelievably
expensive, and on and on. The idea of living in Manhattan… It’s Millionaire’s
Island. It’s very unrealistic. So what’s happened of course is that there’s a whole
musical center and a whole musical life in Brooklyn, and Brooklyn has become
what Soho and Tribeca were in the ’60s and ’70s. How long that will last is really up to questions of real estate prices and all kinds of things that have nothing
to do with the arts whatsoever.
Also, when I was in New York, there was no Internet, there was no Googling
somebody. The opportunity to hear what’s happening, what’s new, what’s going
on, is now possible while sitting anywhere. That does change things. On the
other hand, my life has been dedicated to writing music for live musicians. And
I’m not the only one still following that direction. So long as that is the case,
then you want to be where the best live musicians are and where the most live
musicians are—those two things always go together. Quality and quantity are
intimately connected in the arts. So on that level, New York is still a magnet,
and [even] if you have to schlep yourself in from Hoboken or the outer limits of
Brooklyn, people will continue to do it.
I really can’t imagine a time—or I’d rather not imagine a time—where
there’s no live music being made by live musicians. That’s not to say that there’s
something wrong with doing stuff that’s just on your laptop. But I don’t foresee
that replacing live music, and so long as it doesn’t, New York is going to remain
a center of musical life on our planet.
Steve Reich is a New York-born musician and one of the pioneers of
minimalism. In 2006, Reich’s 70th birthday year, the Brooklyn Academy
of Music, Carnegie Hall, and Lincoln Center joined forces to present
complementary programs of his music.
Ronen Givony is the founder of Wordless Music, a concert series that
pairs rock and electronic musicians with classical music performers,
both in New York and select cities internationally.
23
TECHNICOLOR
CODING
BRENMAR
NICK HOOK
SINJIN HAWKE —LIVE
TUESDAY MAY 21
TAMMANY HALL
152 ORCHARD ST 9PM $5
RED BULL MUSIC ACADEMY NEW YORK 2013
APRIL 28 – MAY 31
236 ARTISTS. 34 NIGHTS. 8000 ANTHEMS. 1 CITY.
WWW.REDBULLMUSICACADEMY.COM
DISCOVER MORE
ON RED BULL MUSIC ACADEMY RADIO
TUNE IN AT RBMARADIO.COM