{"id":2269,"date":"2015-06-16T11:49:36","date_gmt":"2015-06-16T10:49:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/eyeplug.net\/magazine\/?p=2269"},"modified":"2011-06-24T11:36:51","modified_gmt":"2011-06-24T11:36:51","slug":"watch-the-closing-doors-%e2%80%93-a-history-of-new-york%e2%80%99s-musical-melting-pot-vol-1-1945-59","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/watch-the-closing-doors-%e2%80%93-a-history-of-new-york%e2%80%99s-musical-melting-pot-vol-1-1945-59\/","title":{"rendered":"Watch The Closing Doors \u2013 A History of New York\u2019s Musical Melting Pot Vol. 1 (1945-59)"},"content":{"rendered":"

(2 CD set, Future Noise)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Often, the hallmark of a genuinely brilliant concept is that one is immediately thinks, \u2018Why hasn\u2019t this been done before?\u2019 This is especially true of the first instalment of Watch The Closing Doors<\/em>, the start of a projected six part series in which Kris Needs documents the Big Apple\u2019s musical lineage decade-by-decade.<\/p>\n

Fittingly, Volume 1 <\/em>is a sprawling broth of inter-related musical styles, most of which have their origins in locations far removed from New York City, the artists responsible for creating them having graduated toward the almost irresistible pull of America\u2019s cultural epicentre. As Suicide\u2019s Martin Rev (who played a significant role in the genesis of this set) rightly observes, \u2018New York was like the centre of the arts, like Paris and Vienna before them. After those, in all the arts and music, everybody came to New York, all the different varieties; opera, classical, dance. Everyone was in New York. Miles Davis came to New York, everybody.\u2019<\/p>\n

Like so many of\u00a0the artists he has selected, compiler Kris Needs also felt the magnetic draw of New York, ultimately relocating to the city in the mid 1980s, to experience its glamour and grime in more or less equal measure, and adding his own creativity to a lineage defined by this collection. \u2018This first run of tracks is intended as a rapid fire illustration of the amazingly diverse musical styles coursing through New York in these highly formative years,\u2019 he explains.<\/p>\n

Although the generic specifics of the material included here ranges from gospel to the electronic avant garde<\/em> (and all points in-between) much of Watch The Closing Doors <\/em>is interconnected \u2013 via the relationship of its content to the city, the cross-fertilisation of musical styles and the way in which certain artists (Dizzy Gillespie for instance) seem to pop up time and again as the history unfolds. Genre distinctions are irrelevant \u2013 as Primal Scream\u2019s Bobby Gillespie asserts, \u2018Music\u2019s the only place where there are no frontiers apart from what you lack in your own imagination.\u2019 Structurally, the collection is well thought out \u2013 the first disc establishes a firm sense of location and era, while the second expands upon this to demonstrate the way in which New York provided the setting for successive waves of groundbreaking creative development.<\/p>\n

New York\u2019s subway system provides a recurrent motif throughout the collection \u2013 from Needsy\u2019s eye-catching sleeve art, through the manner in which doo-wop titans the Paragons used station platforms as acoustic caverns in which to hone their harmonies, and \u2013 most literally \u2013 in the opening track, Duke Ellington\u2019s \u2018Take The \u201cA\u201d Train\u2019, which provides a wholly appropriate theme for the compilation as a whole.<\/p>\n

The sense of this material acting as a starting point for much of New York\u2019s subsequent creative progression is well defined; Cozy Cole\u2019s visceral backroom beats can be viewed as a germinal indication of the way in which hip-hop subsequently employed raw rhythms; Frankie Lymon, as Martin Rev asserts, is very much a prototype Johnny Thunders; Machito\u2019s Cubop polytheism and Cab Calloway\u2019s style point the way forward to August Darnell and Coati Mundi; groups such as the Almanac Singers established a Greenwich Village folk tradition that would be developed and popularised by the likes of Bob Dylan; while the sonic experimentalism of the incomparable Raymond Scott and Thelonius Monk\u2019s unsettling, perverse beauty connects with the way in which Suicide spliced electronics to bebop and doo-wop to create their own unique brand of Ur-punk.<\/p>\n

Kris Needs\u2019 extensive sleeve notes (it\u2019s basically a book<\/em>) are essential to appreciating the full resonance of the New York Stories being recounted on the two discs. Watch The Closing Doors <\/em>features a wealth of tracks that wholly evoke the city in various forms \u2013 Cab Calloway and Big Maybelle embody Harlem\u2019s seamy underside; the Five Satin\u2019s anthemic doo-wop encapsulates night time Manhattan; the Paragons transport the listener to an era of street corner singing battles; and Charles Mingus\u2019 \u2018Goodbye Pork Pie Hat\u2019 seems to have informed the incidental music to innumerable NYC cop shows.<\/p>\n

This is also a social history \u2013 while Billie Holiday\u2019s \u2018Autumn In New York\u2019 represents a profoundly personal valediction to a city in which she lived and died, Harry Belafonte\u2019s calypso infused \u2018Matilda\u2019 became popular with migrants who interpreted the song as a bridge back to better, less impoverished and oppressed, times back home. Similarly, the social development of New York is fully examined \u2013 Faye Adams\u2019 \u2018Shake A Hand\u2019 being indicative of the way in which gospel influenced rhythm and blues and provided a religious release from the difficulties of hard times.<\/p>\n

The polyglot nature of the Big Apple provided a battleground amid which racism was encountered and largely overcome, and this aspect of the city\u2019s history is well represented by the likes of Louis Armstrong (who transcended racial boundaries through his talent and positivity), Dizzy Gillespie\u2019s punkish rejection of a mainstream from which he was excluded, the New Lost City Ramblers\u2019 opposition to the politics of oppression, and Allen Ginsberg\u2019s embodiment of the manner in which New York lined up at the vanguard of dismissing the paranoid ultra-conservatism of the McCarthy era.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also no shortage of pioneering music on offer here \u2013 key elements of rock\u2019n\u2019roll\u2019s sex-orientated DNA can be found within the scatology of Danny Taylor\u2019s \u2018Coffee Daddy Blues\u2019 and Sonny Terry\u2019s \u2018Custard Pie Blues\u2019, while Big Joe Turner\u2019s \u2018Morning, Noon and Night\u2019 is nothing if not rock\u2019n\u2019roll in its most primal state. Additionally, the way in which existing musical forms cross-pollinated to create new sounds is represented by Horace Silver\u2019s fusion of blues, jazz, latin and gospel, or the Drifters providing a bridge between gospel, doo-wop and the nascent rock\u2019n\u2019roll.<\/p>\n

Having spent the best part of a enjoyable day traversing the tangled lines of this era of New York\u2019s musical biography, I caught up with Needsy and asked him if there was anything that he regretted being unable to include on the set. \u2018I really wanted\u00a0rampant excess king genius Charlie Parker but, like several others, couldn’t get past record company licensing bullshit,\u2019 he reveals. \u2018As I said in the notes, you could write what I knew about experimental music on a gnat’s scrotum, same going for 50s jazz, but a crash course told me about whole new worlds \u2013 and also that I must be mad attempting such a project.\u2019<\/p>\n

So what about Volume 2<\/em>? \u2018The 60s is shaping up, but even harder to get everything on to two CDs. So far, we\u2019ve got the Velvets, Albert Ayler, the Chiffons, Shangri-Las, Nico, Karen Dalton, Tim Rose, Sun Ra, Lenny Bruce, West Side Story, Miles Davis, plus I really want Machine Gun by Hendrix – he started and was discovered in NY, the track’s live at the Fillmore East and remains the most devastating comment on Vietnam war, which was raging at the time. There\u2019s also another Marty Rev chat coming up, plus I’m hoping for handy hints from Chris Stein, It’s like\u00a0a snowball which could assume Empire State proportions by the 80s at this rate!\u2019<\/p>\n

Watch The Closing Doors<\/em> is a landmark document \u2013 that not only comprehensively represents its subject matter, it will \u2013 as it did both its compiler and myself \u2013 expose you to forms of music that you might never otherwise engage with. It looks good, it sounds good, and by gum, it\u2019ll do you good \u2013 go check it out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(2 CD set, Future Noise) Often, the hallmark of a genuinely brilliant concept is that one is immediately thinks, \u2018Why hasn\u2019t this been done before?\u2019 This is especially true of the first instalment of Watch The Closing Doors, the start of a projected six part series in which Kris Needs documents the Big Apple\u2019s musical …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2270,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[90,306,100,83,82,128,71,87,85],"tags":[121,382,256,381,380],"series":[],"class_list":["post-2269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-beats","category-blues","category-djs","category-exotica","category-folk","category-hot-plugs","category-music","category-pop","category-soul","tag-eyeplug","tag-future-noise","tag-kris-needs","tag-new-yorks-musical-melting-pot","tag-watch-the-closing-doors"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2269"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2269\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2269"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=2269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}