TAYLOR STORER 1956-1985

This catalog is dedicated in loving memory of Taylor Storer, who was not only a co-worker but a fine friend to all of us and, perhaps more importantly, to the music.

 

 

FOREWORDS

by Gregory Tate

 

Some folk probably just think of the New Music Distribution Service catalogue as this encyclopedic warehouse stocked with mostly independently recorded jazz and contemporary Euro-American classical music. The more savvy perhaps see it as a networking resource for producers, performers and composers of experimental music.

 

But for reasons that will probably perplex no one I tend to think of each year’s New Music Distribution Service catalogue as a kind of musical version of the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy, with every entry registering like a report from some farflung orbital station. Flipping through its pages can provoke goose pimples of the order of those brought to flesh when Carl Sagan drones on about how many billions upon billions of star systems there are out there and that no, we are not alone.

 

If you’re a music lover of eclectic and exotic listening habits you’ll find consolation in this catalogue and a kind of communion with others the Master Programmer also gave extraterrestrial ear lobes to.

 

For the most part much of the music in the NMDS catalogue defies ready categorization, tending to be defined by the genre rubrics they subvert rather than those they deploy. (It is of course for this reason that the recording of much of this music would only have been undertaken by independent labels run by guerilla-minded entrepreneurs—though the independents who rely on NMDS as an outlet actually function as some of the last spokesmen for free-enterprise late modern capitalism will see.) This is not to say that there’s not also a whole lot of sound contained within that could not be easily filed under such headings as neo-post-bop, maximal minimalism, punk-funk, post-modern opera or even that perennial favorite, classical fusion boogie. What it is to say is that since my own musical tastes run to the polymorphous, most of my choice selections from NMDS catalogues past and present run likewise. Take for example Cecil Taylor’s Garden or really any of his solo recordings where he bridges the gap between Brahms and the blues in but a few lyrical strokes and defies anyone to delimit him to a free-jazz gunslinger type. Or take a listen to Jeffrey Lohn’s “Dirge” a requiem for assassinated South African activist Steve Biko, which is not only of the most aptly horrific pieces of programmatic music ever recorded but one which parodies rock’s roots in African ritual in the same bars it lampoons heavy metals kinship with the music of fascist rallies.

 

Taking an opposing tack would be the pan-ethnic confabs of Kip Hanrahan whose directorial flair for making collaborators out of as disparate as those of Cuban Yoruba drummers and Manhattan art-rockers creates a new definition of the term ‘cosmopolitan’. By the same token you will hear in a piece like Daniel Lentz’ “Lascaux” scored for and performed on 24 wine glasses of varying liquid constituency, a playfully minimal evocation of a host of ambient musics old and new, meaning just about everything from Tibetan bells to Brian Eno.

 

Even if you never hear more than a fraction of the music available in this catalogue take it for what it is on its own merits: a trans-dimensional road map to the alternative music of the spheres. Not to mention, one of the funniest documents late post-modernism has yet produced. If not a source of sonic salvation as yet untapped by any known evangelical order. Get it while it’s heretical.

 

 

Published by the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra Association, Inc.

500 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10012. Telephone (212) 925-2121

 

Original cover art by Keith Haring