The Paris Review

It’s sixty-two degrees and raining in downtown Durham, North Carolina, on a Tuesday in mid-October. At noon members of the Branford Marsalis Quartet gather at the former St. Joseph’s African Methodist Episcopal church, built in 1891, now converted into the Hayti Heritage Center, an arts-and-community nonprofit. Their goal is to record a new album over the next few days.

When Marsalis moved his family to Durham from New York a decade ago, the local press assumed he was replacing the retiring director of Duke’s jazz department, saxophonist Paul Jeffrey. But Marsalis, who'd grown up in Louisiana, simply wanted to return to the South and picked Raleigh-Durham because the area had an airport large enough to get him anywhere he needed to go. Later, he began teaching part-time in the noted jazz program at the historically black North Carolina Central University, which is a mile down the road from Hayti.

The original St. Joseph’s sanctuary remains intact: a wood-plank stage, hardwood pews, a balcony, chandeliers, and lots of stained glass. Marsalis began recording albums here in 2006 when he noticed that the room had a unique quality: there is no reverb at low decibel levels; it grows gradually with the sound.

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Gang Gang Dance was founded in Brooklyn in 2001 by Lizzi Bougatsos, Brian Degraw, Tim DeWit, Josh Diamond, and Nathan Maddox. Informed by hip-hop, eighties pop and goth, and a wealth of international traditional musical styles, the band blends disparate sounds into a global amalgam. This collage approach has garnered attention from the art world; the band’s mixed-media work was included, for instance, in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, and Bougatsos’s installations and collages have been shown at James Fuentes gallery in New York. Last May, Gang Gang Dance released their sixth album, Eye Contact, a tribute to the many loved ones the band has lost—including Maddox, who died in 2002 when he was struck by lightning on a Chinatown rooftop—and a fusion of large, swaggering beats, polyrhythmic sampling, and Bougatsos’s raw, personal lyrics.

“Glass Jar,” on the new album, opens with a sample of a couple phrases that are clearly audible, and then goes through a movement that sounds like it’s contained in glass. The song feels as if it’s hermetically sealed.

It is its own ecosystem, a geo-dome. You can create your own world with your surroundings.

Does music produce common experiences with others?

Music is universal, and extending your music to somebody is about sharing it. But it is also about how they receive it and how a message travels back to you. The best way to receive information about your music is when people talk about it through experience. We have a spiritual adviser named Babylove who travels with the band. And Tony Cox has been documenting our performances for a long time now. When he photographs us, he calls the experience a sphere.

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Saturday, September 10, brings us the extravaganza that is the fourth annual NYC Lit Crawl. We’ll be there, with our dancing shoes on! Join us as we unveil our fall issue to the rock and country stylings of the Dog House Band—featuring Sven Birkerts, David Gates, Wyatt Mason, and James “Sin Killer” Wood, among others. The new mag will be hot off the presses: Lydia Davis on translation, Dennis Cooper and Nicholson Baker on writing dirty books, Terry Castle’s stash of anonymous kiddie photos, and more.

When: Saturday, September 10; the band plays from 8:15–9:45 P.M.; drinks till ??.

Where: Fontana’s Bar (21+)
105 Eldridge Street
New York, NY 10002

“It’s actually nice to play on this piano because it’s got the funk,” said the virtuoso jazz pianist Jason Moran. He was seated at an old Kurtzman upright piano and had just finished playing a lush, hard-swinging solo version of “The Sheik of Araby,” a tune he recently learned for his Fats Waller dance party at the Harlem Stage Gatehouse. His comment elicited nervous laughter from the crowd of fans who’d crammed themselves into the main room of a suffocatingly hot Lower East Side apartment late last month—some of us seated on fold-out chairs, others on the floor—to hear him play two unaccompanied sets. Moran, one of the most celebrated young jazz artists of the last ten years, seemed right at home in this intimate, makeshift performance space, aptly named A Gathering of Tribes. Although he has been justly praised for his sometimes cerebral approach to jazz, the no-frills atmosphere of the venue, which attracts players of every school and listeners of every stripe, accentuated the earthier side of his style.

A Gathering of Tribes is the home of author and educator Steve Cannon, a man the writer Paul Beatty, who dropped by for Moran’s second set, once referred to as “professor emeritus of the Lower East Side.” For the past twenty years Cannon has used his apartment to stage public readings, concerts, and art exhibitions. The venture reflects his devotion to the local community and his desire to preserve its vanishing bohemian character, which he came to know firsthand upon moving there from New Orleans in the 1960s. Cannon has made Tribes a particularly important site for contemporary jazz music. It boasts an impressive roster of past performers, including Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, Butch Morris, and Matthew Shipp.

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I have never particularly enjoyed rock criticism. It has a tendency to read bombastic, and the references feel dated almost instantly. None of this is true of Ellen Willis. When I first started reading her a few years ago, I wondered if I liked her writing simply because we share the same gender; now I think I like her because she was right.

Willis, who was a native of Queens and a Barnard graduate, was hired by The New Yorker as the magazine’s first pop-music critic in 1968. Her tenure lasted seven years, and her column, Rock, Etc., covered everything from The Rolling Stones and Joni Mitchell to the birth of punk and Bette Midler.

Her criticism could be feisty (Carly Simon’s “wide-eyes lyrics inevitably aroused my class antagonism”) or dismissive (The Velvet Underground’s eponymous album was “all about death, junkies, Delmore Shwartz—stuff like that”), but it was always sharp (Elvis was “John and Paul in one package”).

She understood fandom and feminism equally—something all too rare in the present, where music criticism is still dominated by men. Willis was able to love Patti Smith as a rock-and-roll heroine but criticize her identity. She found Smith’s “androgynous, one-of-the guys image” to be problematic. “Its rebelliousness is seductive, but it plays into a kind of misogyny that consents to distinguish a woman who acts like one of the guys (and is also sexy and conspicuously ‘liberated’) from the general run of stupid girls.”

Which is why it’s so unfortunate that she stopped writing about music in the early eighties. She felt like music had lost its edge after punk. She certainly didn’t disappear—she taught at NYU, wrote nonmusic criticism, and occasionally chimed in with a review of a Bob Dylan album when she felt like it—but her legacy became somewhat obscure. Her death from lung cancer in 2006, at the age of sixty-four, only made it worse.

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Published in 2001, Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life featured the story of thirteen seminal indie bands from 1981–1991. Since then, his accounts of the decade’s underground do-it-yourself punk ethos has inspired a generation of music geeks, connoisseurs, and professionals—many of whom have gone on to found or play in various contemporary indie bands of note. On Sunday, a ten-year anniversary show at the Bowery Ballroom will unite fourteen such bands—from the Dirty Projectors to Titus Andronicus—each covering songs by one of the groups he documented. I recently sat down with Azerrad, an old friend and former bandmate, to talk about his book’s ongoing role in the music being made today.

Just the other day, I was reading your book in a cafe, and a waiter who saw it immediately came up wanting to talk. You describe underground indie fans back in the eighties wearing the SST record-label T-shirt, or sporting a Black Flag tattoo. In a sense, to certain people, your book’s now as powerful an identifier, even ten years after being published. What’s going on with that?

To have read that book means that you’ve been exposed to a certain philosophy, and odds are you agree with some of it. It spells out an ethos inherited from those eighties underground indie bands—opting out of the corporate machinery, keeping money inside the community, thinking for yourself, doing it yourself. You can apply those ideas to lots of things besides music—that's why the book is called Our Band Could Be Your Life.

This same waiter paused to ask if I was reading your book for class. What’s it like to know that Our Band Could Be Your Life is now thought of as required classroom reading?

I had a very classical education, so part of me is very dubious: You’re reading my book in a class? You should be reading about the Revolutionary War, or studying Plato! But I suppose the story is part of cultural history. The mandate to think for yourself, and to do it yourself, and to live responsibly—that’s a thread woven deep in our culture. I asked Ian MacKaye (of Minor Threat and Fugazi) if he’d ever read Walden. He didn’t know anything about it, but philosophically he’s a Thoreau descendant to the core.

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