New York City is not what it used to be. That in itself is the endur­ing fea­ture of the place, which is con­stantly being made then remade then remade. The city doesn’t have the ancient past of a place like Rome, so, although there is a preser­va­tion move­ment, there is far less chal­lenge in try­ing to jux­ta­pose the present with the long for­got­ten past, because the past was not that long ago, and never com­pletely forgotten.

New York is also the most Amer­i­can of all places. Along with the Enlight­en­ment desire for per­sonal lib­erty and free­dom of con­science, the coun­try stands on a foun­da­tion of com­mer­cial enter­prise, and we live in the cen­ter of that uni­verse, here in the big city. This is all to explain why the trans­for­ma­tion of Times Square from its late 1970s — early 1980s squalor (gritty is too kind a word) to its cur­rent state as the true cross­roads of the world, in terms of the ori­gins of the peo­ple who flock there, doesn’t give me a twinge of sen­ti­men­tal loss. The Times Square of head shops, porno the­aters, hook­ers and live sex shows was a com­mer­cial enter­prise just as much as the cur­rent one is. Call­ing it a play­ground for adults only damns the adults who found con­struc­tive play­ful­ness there. Per­son­ally, I can put it best by admit­ting that I saw “The Ter­mi­na­tor” and “C.H.U.D.” in the­aters there, and also “Caligula,” with Span­ish sub­ti­tles and some things with Vanessa Del Rio in them. No, I don’t miss the place.

Other parts of New York have been trans­formed since then, with more mixed results. It’s a good thing that the Bow­ery is safer than it used to be, but when a fancy hotel prices the Down­town Music Gallery out of the neigh­bor­hood, some­thing very strange is going on. And then there’s the East Vil­lage. And Tomp­kins Square Park. The Pyra­mid Club is still there, but does any­thing hap­pen there any­more that mat­ters? The park itself is lovely and liv­able, as a park should be — they are pub­lic resources meant for all cit­i­zens, and no group, no mat­ter how wor­thy or sym­pa­thetic, should have a monop­oly on the place. Parks are for kids, and lovers, and nap­ping and strolling. The trou­ble is that the park may now have a gen­tle monop­oly that has shoved some of those cit­i­zens out of its gates.

It was the Riot that did it, the Tomp­kins Part Riot in the sum­mer of 1988. The con­text for the riot was a stew of social antag­o­nisms; the East Vil­lage was already begin­ning to gen­trify, putting young pro­fes­sion­als on the same streets with young punks and squat­ters, junkies and street crim­i­nals. There were protests against gen­tri­fi­ca­tion, and com­plaints over loud music played in the park. At a protest on August 6, the police charged and attacked cit­i­zens and ended up beat­ing on every­one in sight, just because they could. The imme­di­ate result united all sides in out­rage for the moment, but for the peo­ple who lived in the East Vil­lage on lit­tle or no money, the peo­ple who came to the East Vil­lage for a sense of free­dom, even anar­chy, not avail­able at home or even in Green­wich Vil­lage, those peo­ple had already lost the war before this bat­tle was joined. The freaks, weirdos, out­casts, good and bad, the irrev­er­ent heart of this city and Amer­ica, had to scat­ter to … Brook­lyn, New Jer­sey, Asto­ria … where ever.

A cer­tain focus in art was lost, espe­cially in music. This was the high point of post-punk “down­town” music, an excit­ing, extro­verted move­ment that had less of a goal than a method, which was to try shit and see how it worked. It was a gen­eral drift of sym­pa­thy that brought together the likes of John Zorn, Sonic Youth, Lydia Lunch, Arto Lind­say, Peter Bleg­vad, Tom John­son, mem­bers of the Sun Ra Arkestra, and many, many oth­ers in a mix of jazz, punk, funk, Stock­hausen, car­toon music, free impro­vi­sa­tion and gen­er­ally good natured, bound­ary evap­o­rat­ing anar­chy. There was enough sense of dis­or­ga­ni­za­tion, real or imag­ined, so that the music that was in the clubs, on tapes, avail­able at the New Music Dis­tri­b­u­tion Ser­vice or the old Lunch For Your Ears, had a sur­prise to it, the feel­ing that the cats just hap­pened to turn the cor­ner of Avenue C and hey, what’s going on, we got this gig, you want to play too? It was casual, but seri­ous, because the musi­cians were seri­ous about what they were doing, and either seri­ously skilled or, like Chris­t­ian Mar­clay, seri­ously bril­liant con­cep­tu­al­ists and artists.

For the most part, it’s all gone. Yes, the music being made right now, music I hear and see and write about often, does destroy the bound­aries between gen­res. It does so in dif­fer­ent ways, though, with dif­fer­ent qual­i­ties. The old down­town scene was not only rough-edged but didn’t so much syn­the­size dif­fer­ent music as put them side by side to see what would come out of the con­flict and abra­sion. Today’s down­town scene is, lit­er­ally, uptown, and the music has had time to steep in uni­ver­si­ties and con­ser­va­to­ries, where musi­cians and com­posers have found ways to put the dif­fer­ent parts together into well-made pieces. One is in no way bet­ter than the other, but it would be prefer­able to have them both.

One of the rem­nants of this scene is Elliott Sharp. He’s not a fos­sil nor a throw­back, he’s sim­ply been mak­ing music, pro­lif­i­cally, since the late 1970s, and he is cel­e­brat­ing his 60th birth­day (which was March 1), this week­end at Issue Project Room. Sharp is a fab­u­lous, seri­ous musi­cian, prac­ticed, knowl­edge­able and com­mit­ted. The musi­cians and ensem­bles he’ll be play­ing with attest to his aston­ish­ing range and, even more, a gen­er­ous and sym­pa­thetic musi­cal nature that comes through clearly in his play­ing. You can hear it on four new record­ings that have come out in just the last year alone — there are more, I just haven’t got them yet!

Sharps abil­ity to play the gui­tar is sur­passed only by his imag­i­na­tion, intel­li­gence and skill as an impro­viser. Impro­vis­ing is more than just mak­ing some­thing up, it is mak­ing some­thing out of what you made up, and it’s a skill that demands excel­lent chops and a con­stant sup­ply of inter­est­ing things to say — you have to be an inter­est­ing per­son. I’ve never spo­ken with Sharp, but I have heard count­less inter­est­ing things from him. Take the fluid den­sity of Octal, Book Two , the fol­low up to a 2008 CD. The liner notes dis­cuss Lisa Randall’s book “Warped Pas­sages,” the use of alter­nate tun­ings and the way his gui­tar is miked, and it’s all inter­est­ing and doesn’t really mat­ter, because the play­ing is just aston­ish­ing. Sharp plucks the strings with his fin­gers, and that allows him to pro­duce poly­phonic music that is dense with activ­ity and, because of his skill, always clear. While he doesn’t play at all like Cecil Tay­lor, he is very much like Tay­lor in the sheer mass and veloc­ity of his ideas, flow­ing forth in a rapid, con­trolled stream, each one as defined as a dia­mond. The two Octal record­ings are on the jazz Clean Feed label, but they’re not really jazz and he’s never been a jazz musi­cian. There is a whole uni­verse of impro­vi­sa­tion beyond jazz, music that is as much a great art and ded­i­cated call­ing, and Sharp is one of the very finest ever put on record. These CDs are essen­tial record­ings for any­one inter­ested in him or impro­vised music, and he’ll be play­ing excerpts from the music at the Sat­ur­day con­cert. The term face-melting will truly apply.

He’s not a jazz player, but he’s a hell of a blues gui­tarist, and his band Ter­ra­plane makes great, heavy, mod­ern blues, seri­ously real and fun. The music is so strong and real. While other musi­cians with roots in the down­town scene have gone on to build con­glom­er­a­tions based in glib­ness, increas­ingly self-referential, ges­tural and jejune, on Abstrac­tion Dis­trac­tion , Sharp has done, almost casu­ally, what many oth­ers try and do with great effort and never quite suc­ceed at; he’s made a record of truly abstract funk, all by him­self, using elec­tron­ics to sup­port his impres­sive tenor and soprano sax play­ing. The open­ing “Quad­ran­tids” starts off with a pleas­antly ana­log rum­ble, the kind of thing you get by twist­ing a nob on a fil­ter, and then heads into amaz­ing ter­ri­tory, free-form but also con­trolled, based on pat­terns but full of sur­prises, truly dance­able. He has a nice, strong, mel­low sound on both horns, bits of qual­i­ties from great jazz play­ers who have come before, but the elec­tron­ics seem to recon­tex­tu­al­ize any bits of jazz his­tory out of the pic­ture, and the result is a music that is both truly strange and truly new. Some of Bill Laswell’s units have tried to reach a sim­i­lar place, music that has the funk and intel­lec­tual free­dom, but he always loses his way into ironic pop clichés. Sharp is one of the most cliché-free musi­cians there is, on par with Derek Bai­ley and Lee Konitz, and this gives the record an almost naïve fresh­ness, like Sharp can only do things that have not been done before. I’ve never heard any­thing like Abstrac­tion Dis­trac­tion, which, now that I’ve heard how pos­si­ble this music is, seems a deep shame. This disc is not for every­one, it will per­turb any expec­ta­tions of stan­dard song forms, but it is not only a treat but a tes­ta­ment to Sharp’s endur­ing artis­tic vision. Cur­rently in heavy rota­tion at the 8BC Lounge in For­got­ten New York …

One of the land­marks of this for­got­ten New York was the Bini­bon, a 24 hour joint at 2nd and 5th, a scene hang­out back in the late 70s-early 80s. It’s also the title and sub­ject of Sharp’s opera, with a libretto by Jack Wom­ack. The Bini­bon is where Jack Henry Abbott, back in the City due in no small part to Nor­man Mailer’s slum­ming, encoun­tered waiter Richard Adan, and soon after stabbed him to death. Sharp and Womack’s Bini­bon is based around this tragedy, fol­lows a nar­ra­tive of per­sonal mem­o­ries and regrets through a hand­ful of char­ac­ters, includ­ing Abbott, cul­mi­nat­ing in the event that the piece rep­re­sents as a sym­bol of the end of an era. The mur­der, and the clos­ing of the Bini­bon, hap­pened in 1981, well before the riot, but like I said, the strug­gle had been lost by 1988, per­haps the opera explains the begin­ning of the end.

This is an excel­lent piece. It fea­tures long, spo­ken nar­ra­tion, but straight for­ward, not in the man­ner of Robert Ash­ley. There is singing too, but it’s a real opera regard­less of the bal­ance between speak­ing and singing. Sharp’s music sup­ports the text beau­ti­fully and tells the story in its own way. Womack’s libretto is tough-guy-romantic in style, a bit clichéd but saved by its sin­cer­ity. The band; gui­tar, sax­o­phone, clar­inet, bass, drums, per­cus­sion and elec­tron­ics, is great, because it’s all Elliott Sharp — he makes and plays all the music, a rich melange of punk, jazz, rock, beau­ti­fully heavy early hip-hop beats. It’s force­ful, expertly col­ored and judged, always inter­est­ing. This is a truly impres­sive work on CD, involv­ing, fas­ci­nat­ing, emo­tion­ally pow­er­ful, one of the most accom­plished new, non-standard operas I’ve heard in a long time.

Why stop with that? There’s a film score out too, for “Spec­tropia,” a sci­ence fic­tion movie involv­ing time travel. This gives Sharp the reason/excuse, to write music for dif­fer­ent ensem­bles in dif­fer­ent styles. The range on this CD is like that on one of Zorn’s col­lec­tions of his own film music, but in this case the range is focussed on one sub­ject. There are sludgy gui­tar chords, bounc­ing dig­i­tal bleeps, shuf­fling jazz, string quar­tet music, and the strongest singing I’ve heard from Deb­bie Harry. Along with Sharp, the musi­cians include the Sir­ius String Quar­tet and the ‘31 Band, fea­tur­ing Rudresh Mahan­thappa, Steve Swell and Anthony Cole­man. This is not as deep or pow­er­ful an artis­tic state­ment as the other record­ings dis­cussed here, the vari­ety of sound with­out the film comes off as frag­mented at times, but it’s full of inven­tion and is an admirable book­end to the music that Sharp has given us so far.

Go see this great musi­cian, it will be mem­o­rable. Fri­day, the event is at the 110 Liv­ingston Street future home of IPR, and is a ben­e­fit for the venue, with tick­ets that include an after-party and spe­cial VIP events for tax-deductible, VIP prices. Sat­ur­day is in the cozy con­fines at 3rd and 3rd, a place where even strangers are joined in the friend­ship of music. That day starts with an open rehearsal at five, and goes late into the evening. It will be great.

UPDATE: fixed video links

UPDATE 2: put in the clas­sic photo to help fill out new theme

Related Arti­cles

• Pio­neers of the Down­town Scene: a walk on the wall side (guardian.co.uk)
• Improvvisatore Involon­tario in New York (avantmusicnews.com)