Expanding horizons – discovering electronic music and then the downtown loft scene(s)

Part two of a brief memoir of the first two decades of my musical evolution

When my family loaded our Ford Country Squire station wagon, headed to Potsdam, New York, we were headed to a college campus I knew nothing about. I loved the Adirondack Mountains, which were two hours to the south of campus - I had backpacked there since eighth grade, and we had taken vacations in Montreal, Quebec City, and the Laurentians. But the North Country of New York State was new turf for me. I heard that SUNY Potsdam’s Crane School of Music was a solid place to study, so there I went.

We drove north in August 1973 with my electric piano, records, and some clothing in tow, ready to begin my new life. The first semester was a disappointing reminder of the Julliard curriculum I left behind.

But something new and unanticipated happened that Spring, when I moved into a dorm with an “artsy” reputation. Once there, I met numerous musicians and others who have remained lifelong friends. Many of them shared something unusual in common – studying with a gifted and creative professor, Dr. Donald Funes. That experience literally changed my life yet again.

The semester started off with a bang, when a group of friends and I attended a concert by the band Weather Report at nearby St. Lawrence College (now University). I had just begun listening to their first two albums, and I loved the mix of lyricism and abstraction, plus the chemistry between saxophonist Wayne Shorter and keyboardist Josef Zawinul. At this point, the band was introducing a funk beat and after ten minutes of uncomfortable adjustment, I liked it. I would see Weather Report perform again, five years later, during the height of their stardom with bassist Jaco Pastorius, at the Beacon Theater in New York City. While I continued listening to their music until the band folded and I appreciated the increasingly catchy melodies and rhythms, there was nothing like their first years.

Now that I was in Don Funes’ orbit, Crane became a fabulous, exciting place. Don was expansively eclectic. He presented freewheeling but well-informed connections between repertoire I knew, (Bach, Beethoven, Jethro Tull and the Who) with late Romantics (particularly Richard Wagner’s operas), the multimedia extravaganzas of John Cage, electronic timbres of Morton Subotnick, and, notably for me, John Coltrane. The live electronic music ensemble led by Don performed works like Terry Riley’s “In C” and Frederick Rzewski’s “Les Moutins de Panurge”, we also played an opera by Jacob Schechtman (“Captain Anxiety”; I also played his large work for percussion and solo piano with the Crane Percussion Ensemble), music by Frank Zappa, and collective improvisations. It was incredibly fun and a great learning experience. David Behrman visited and performed “Run Through” with some of the students; I was not part of that project, instead choosing to work with an improvisatory quartet, playing pieces from Stockhausen’s Aus dem seiben tagen.

This photo was taken a year after I left Potsdam, but it captures something of the scene. Here, the pieces of paper scattered around the ensemble is most likely a single-page musical score. Source: SUNY Potsdam 1976 Yearbook.

Don also built a fabulous and conceptually diverse electronic music studio. It incorporated magnetic tape splicing technique with the newly emerging, performable and adaptable analog electronic synthesizers. My favorite of these was a system developed by Don Buchla – the instigator and early champion of Buchla’s instruments is Mort Subotnick. This was my first experience of modular systems; these integrated the various elements needed to generate and shape sound: oscillators, modulators, amplifiers, endlessly re-patchable using spaghetti-like arrays of cables ending in “banana” plugs. Also in the studio was a first-generation Mini Moog, an ARP 2600, and an early pin-patchable Synthi, also known as the EMS VCS3. The latter is a synthesizer I first saw played during the King Crimson concert I attended outside of London, in 1971. I spent hours in the studio Don had designed. I produced several extended compositions, and this began my love of modular analog synthesizers, particularly ones without keyboards. I continue to work with modular systems to this day.

Don Funes embraced a tradition of musical evenings at his home where groups would do little more than listen and sometimes drink wine. One weekend it was the entire Wagner Ring Cycle. On another evening, we listened to Coltrane’s A Love Supreme from beginning to end, more than once. I found Coltrane’s music, something new to me, to be deeply moving emotionally, and sonically, I was fascinated by the grainy sound of his tenor, and the soaring sounds of his soprano saxophone. His imaginative, searching flights of melodic shapes and turns captivated me attention, as did the constantly shifting yet somehow drone-like backdrop of the rhythm section. The repetition and expansion of motifs became emblazed in my memory. Coltrane’s playing is what really opened me to jazz. We were also listening to Ravi Shankar and Usted Alla Rakha.

During the long drive back to the New York Metropolitan area, one of my friends and fellow pianist Mitch Forman played Herbie Hancock's albums Crossings, Mwandishi, and the newly released Head Hunters, which provided my opening to electric jazz and to funk. Head Hunters and Billy Cobham’s Crosswinds were the rage in our circles. But Crossings was what really engaged me. Thirty-five years later, I began to play some of the music from Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi band and it became the subject of the first of my four books about music, You’ll Know When You Get There: Herbie Hancock and the Mwandishi Band (University of Chicago Press, 2012). In the introduction, I highlight what I believe to be the most important attributes:

“The Mwandishi band emerged from Hancock’s original 1968 Sextet, which in 1969 became his first touring ensemble as a bandleader. As that band became increasingly exploratory and underwent a change of personnel, its Mwandishi incarnation became the experimental laboratory in which Hancock first integrally joined the core musical elements that would form the building blocks that have served his musical creativity throughout his career.

A version of the initial band was the one I saw in 1969 as a teenager, at the Schaefer Music Festival.

“… What defined the Mwandishi band was a constellation of features. None of them alone explain the nature of Hancock’s project. Among these are collective improvisation and the careful listening it requires; open musical forms; the primacy of timbre (tone color) and rhythm over and above melody and harmony; black cultural identification and representation; and the integration of acoustic, electric, and eventually electronic sounds as part of a single sonic tapestry. It was with all of these musical attributes in hand that Hancock drew on the Mwandishi band as a dynamic vehicle for his compositions…”

This is a portion of the graphic score I created of Bennie Maupin’s “Water. Torture” (on Crossings), to visualize the opening mix of Pat Gleeson’s synthesizer overdubs, percussion played by all members of the band, and other sonic layers. Included in my Mwandishi band book.

My college friends and I were also captivated by Chick Corea’s next electric band, Return to Forever (RTF), who came to Potsdam, and my whole gang listened together, well into the night. I also played in a wonderful collective improvisatory group, Maya, which featured saxophonist Michael Saarie, guitarist Phil Moylin, drummer Sterling Post, with me on piano and RMI electric piano. I had not yet traded the RMI in for a Fender Rhodes.

This is a brief segment from a 1974 performance by Maya at an art gallery, captured on a reel-to-reel recorder with but one or two microphones. If you listen closely, halfway through, you’ll hear an essential element within this collective improvisation, the melody to Joni Mitchell’s “Song to a Seagull.” The band’s repertoire also included “In a Silent Way.”

Other musical experiences during this time that left an indelible mark was an open performance of Toru Takemitsu’s Dorian Horizon, Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, both for string sections. My Potsdam crew being a group with eclectic tastes, we also went to see concerts featuring Laura Nyro, Todd Rundgren, Harry Chapin, and Joni Mitchell.

Like some of my friends, I left Potsdam before graduating. After a few months back around New York City, I transferred to SUNY Albany. I had begun to feel lost in the North Country and wanted to remain closer to the City. Somehow I thought that New York State’s capital district was close; it really wan’t, but still, it was half the drive to Potsdam. I had already completed most of my Music major and I found in Albany two new mentors, Joel Chadabe and Dr. Philip M. Royster. Joel taught in the Music Department and Phil in African and Afro-American Studies, each of whom became among my most important friends years later. I graduated with a concentration in Electronic Music.

Phil Royster, a writer and musician, grew up on the South Side of Chicago with innumerable personal experiences of musicians who were to become deeply important to me. Phil’s musicality, expressiveness and warmth, plus his broad grasp of historical and cultural context, provided me with a model for what it might be a creative musician and scholar. He introduced me to the music of Henry Threadgill and Air, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, late John Coltrane, and Earth Wind and Fire, just to name a few (Phil had been invited to join Earth, Wind and Fire during its early period but chose instead graduate school and a career in academia).

Here’s Phil Royster right around the time we first met when I was his student. As an aside, I would wake up some mornings and hear coming from a nearby park, sounds of Phil’s drumming, looking just like this image from a concert. Photographer unknown.

Joel’s core teaching interests, also expressed through the studios he built at SUNY Albany, focused on emerging ideas about interactive systems. I worked in his analog Moog CEMS (the Coordinated Electronic Music Studio System) studio that dated to the late 1960s. This was an early systematized modular instrument, but I used it in a more conventional way to generate electronic sounds from which I would construct sound collage.

Late 1960s image of the CEMS system in the SUNY Albany electronic music studio.

In his own compositional work, Joel had moved on to a programmable hardware-software hybrid system centered on a small mainframe PDP-11 computer. He taught about the way changes in musical ideas paralleled changes in all other fields and he spoke about new paradigms and scientific revolutions. One such paradigm that he termed “items and arrangements” described the collage approach that spanned Picasso and Braque’s visual collages, Stravinsky’s overlapping layered structures in Petrushka, and early tape music. Shortly after I graduated Joel purchased the first Synclavier, an early digital electronic musical instrument with which he interacted using Theremin antennae.

I reestablished my connection with Joel Chadabe about fifteen years after I graduated when I was seeking a way back into electronic music after a long period away from it. He introduced me to the programming environment Max/MSP which I’ve used for many years of musical performances and exhibitions of interactive installations.

Image: Joel around the year 2000. I’m not positive about the photographer.

During the months between Potsdam and Albany (1975-76), my time in New York City presented opportunities to directly experience the downtown Loft scene, something I returned to again when I was next living New York after college (1978-1979).

There were two distinct sets of “downtown lofts.” These were often situated in formerly industrial buildings across the Lower East Side, East Village, and the area between Houston and Canal Streets (emerging as Soho). One scene consisted primarily of Black musicians, members of the Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and the Black Artists Guild (BAG). I gravitated to Sam and Bea Rivers’ Studio Rivbea at 24 Bond Street. I also went to Environ, upstairs at 476 Broadway and Grand Street, and Tin Palace at 324 The Bowery. There were others as well.

Two clusters of musicians were of greatest interest to me: Anthony Braxton’s various projects and improvisatory group The Revolutionary Ensemble (violinist Leroy Jenkins, bassist Sirone, and percussionist Jerome Cooper).

Image: Anthony Braxton in 1974, by Jan Persson.

I felt fortunate to see Braxton play in all sorts of musical configurations, most often at Studio Rivbea. These included duets with David Holland, trios with Holland and Barry Altschul, and various quartets. The Holland-Altschul rhythm section was playing with both Braxton and Sam Rivers’s bands; eventually, they chose the latter. They had previously been part of Miles Davis’ first electric band, nicknamed the “lost quintet” and then a trio with Chick Corea, expanded to the quartet Circle when Anthony Braxton joined. I really loved the interplay between Holland-Altschul, throughout these settings.

On another evening, I saw Dave Holland’s Conference of the Birds lineup that included both Anthony Braxton and Sam Rivers. Another concert during this era (at The Bottom Line) was Braxton’s quartet with Holland, Altschul, and this time, trombonist George Lewis.

Image: Sam Rivers and Joe Dailey performing at Studio Rivbea. Date and photographer unknown to me.

The most unusual of the Braxton concerts during the mid-1970s was a solo performance. Throughout the evening, he ranged between an encyclopedia-like array of saxophones. These included the tiny sopranino, the more familiar soprano and alto, reaching down to the bass saxophone and, then the wildest, the contrabass saxophone. One had to climb a stair or two within the structure that encased the saxophone to access the mouthpiece.

The Revolutionary Ensemble was for me the consummate collective improvisatory group. My level of excitement rivaled how I had felt about King Crimson. I remember concerts shortly before the start of Spring 1977 college semester when TRE performed at Tin Palace, and not many months later at The Public Theater. Another highlight was a solo recital by TRE percussion Jerome Cooper, probably at Environ.

Here is how I described The Revolutionary Ensemble’s music approach in my second book, The Miles Davis Lost Quintet and Other Revolutionary Ensembles (University of Chicago Press, 2016)

“individual and group configurations were malleable constructs, one giving way to the other without so much as a moment’s notice. Collectivity could just as soon feature simultaneous and multiple individual initiatives as it could musical togetherness. Construction of a cohesive whole was constantly subject to instantaneous negotiation. Some might view this approach as anarchic, but the three musicians of the Revolutionary Ensemble functioned like a musical high-wire act, sounding sometimes like one voice and at other times like independent individuals coexisting in the same sound space.”

During this same period, I also saw the World Saxophone Quartet (David Murray, Oliver Lake, Julius Hemphill, and Hamiet Bluiett) perform and they became an instant favorite ensemble, a blend of through composed and improvised music built on the interplay between saxophones of several sizes and varieties.

The second cluster of lofts I mentioned hosted performances by Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Herb Niblock, and others. Around 1974, I was in the packed loft audiences, sitting on the floor, for Steve Reich’s Drumming, and an early segment of what became Philip Glass’s Music in Twelve Parts (maybe Five Lines).

As my time in college and then New York City came towards an end, I felt unsure of where my life should head. I had a chance to see the Cecil Taylor Unit, when they performed at the Whitney Museum. An evening at the Village Vanguard with The Keith Jarrett Quartet (saxophonist Dewey Redman, bassist Charlie Haden, and drummer Paul Motian), playing a version of Survivor Suite, introduced me to music that I came to incorporate within my own repertoire during the 2010s. This band, along with The Revolutionary Ensemble became touchstones for my ideal vision of what an improvisatory ensemble can be.

Ornette Coleman had significantly entered my radar and was becoming of increasing importance to me. Ornette’s fragmented melodicism (I’ve always seen him as essentially a melodic player and composer); the idea that a composition could open with a melody and then go wherever it went was a compelling idea. The intensity of Ornette’s recordings, from the earliest sessions with Paul Bley (who later became a touchtone for me, as did Jaki Byard), followed by those from the period of his arrival at the Five Spot in New York, to the string quartets of 1962, the alternately placid and stormy orchestral Skies of America, the great 1969 quintet concert at New York University documented on Crisis, the beautiful opening vocal compo

So did Miles Davis’s electric bands (the first configuration of which is discussed in my 2016 book). In the book, I contextualize this band alongside The Revolutionary Ensemble and Circle. Back in the 1970s, it was Miles’ 1975 recordings (with guitarist Pete Cosey) and the studio album Get Up With It that got most of my attention. I completely missed Pat Metheny’s early albums; his work didn’t enter my musical radar until the early 1980s, particularly Offramp, The First Circle, and the albums that included former Ornette Coleman bandmembers. I find it interesting to consider the connections – and lack thereof – between what intrigued me in young adulthood and what has captured my attention as a musician and writer in recent years. (To wit, Metheny’s been a serious focus of the past six years, culminating in the book Pat Metheny, Stories beyond Words (University of Chicago Press, 2024) and trio album Transcendence: Music of Pat Metheny (FMR 2025); had Metheny not gifted me a copy of his Songbook in 2018, none of this would have likely happened.)

By the late 1970s, music was losing its hold on me. I had never known a life without music at the center, but questions continually tugged at me about the value of being a career musician. My biggest crises in college circled around “what is it that music achieves” and “what does music communicate?” When I compared the work I was beginning to do regarding “domestic” and other forms of violence against women with six hours at the piano or playing a concert, I lacked an answer. And I felt that communication was central to my life, but music might not have any ability to speak. I generally (but not always) think differently about these questions now, but I felt stymied as I felt the need to make career decisions.

I gave serious thought to spending at least part of summer 1979 attending workshops at the Creative Music Studio, where much of the “loft” scene seemed to migrate in the summer. I sometimes wonder how my life might have unfolded differently had I made this choice. But I was burnt out on music and drawn by community-focused work. The musical option simply began to evaporate from my consciousness, accompanied more by indifference than sadness.

I moved to Ithaca, New York to further my communal work and I realized that I was heading into a new phase in my life. The next decade and a half wouldn’t be devoid of music - I continued to attend performances of many kinds, and I was reintroduced to the electronic music of Mort Subotnick. I continued playing piano but performed very rarely. Thus, begun a tremendously rich era in my life, one beyond the scope of this essay

And then…

Nearly fifteen years later, having completed degrees in rabbinical studies and social work and served as a professional in communal organizations, I found myself yearning to once again compose music. One day in 1994, I picked up the phone, called Joel Chadabe, and met him at his office in Albany. He introduced me to the Max programming environment (later, Max/MSP/Jitter) and within three years, I had released my first two recordings. I was about to embark on a master’s degree program in Electronic Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and composing and performing moved back to the center of my life.

Image: the eBoard, one of several sensor-fitted electronic musical instruments that I built in the early 2000s. Photographer: Bob Gluck.

Initially, my performances were exclusively electronic, but gradually the piano edged its way back, among an array of electronic technologies. Soon, I was composing and performing with electronically expanded piano systems and this music began to intersect with the jazz repertoire I loved. At this juncture, I’ve released twelve recordings spanning purely acoustic music, purely electronic music, and several hybrids.

I’ve enjoyed the mixing and matching media approach that I’ve taken throughout my musical career. This blend is - truly - a reflection of the breadth of interests and their integration, modeled by my teachers. How these interpenetrating worlds have found a voice within my music is something to explore at a future date.