Thurston Moore is obsessive about jazz.
Not the mellow, easy-listening selection that serves as background music in elevators and ready rooms.
No, Moore goes for the onerous stuff: wailing saxophones, arrhythmic bass traces, drums that comply with beats so out of time they could as nicely come from the deepest reaches of house. Name it broadcasts from Planet Jazz.
We’re speaking free jazz, an experiment in improvisational music that captivated the world’s best jazz musicians within the second half of the twentieth century: Albert Ayler, Derek Bailey, Ornette Coleman — and so forth.
For the final six years, Moore has been pouring this ardour into a brand new e book: “Now Jazz Now: 100 Important Free Jazz and Improvisation Recordings 1960-80,” co-written by Byron Coley and Mats Gustafsson and printed by Ecstatic Peace Library, the publishing imprint he runs with Eva Moore. The e book additionally options phrases from Neneh Cherry and Joe McPhee.
The irony is plentiful. The previous singer, songwriter and guitarist of Sonic Youth, an experimental rock band with one foot in New York’s no wave second and one other within the indie rock explosion of the early Nineties, is dedicated to a subgenre of music that isn’t precisely identified for loud electrical guitars.
It’s additionally a departure from the autobiographical writing in Moore’s memoir “Sonic Life” printed in 2023, or the work he does as a writing teacher on the Jack Kerouac Faculty of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa College in Boulder, Colo.
However, the e book covers what he and his co-authors think about the 100 best data by artists each legendary and obscure. “Now Jazz Now” is greater than a group of best hits, it’s the chronicling of a decades-long obsession with free jazz between “three report geeks who’re actually into gathering,” Moore mentioned through Zoom from his house in London final month.
In a way, the e book started again within the ’80s when Coley, Gustafsson and Moore began gathering these unusual recorded paperwork in experimental sound at a time when these data had been onerous to seek out and even more durable to analysis.
“We knew that it was obscure,” Moore mentioned. “We weren’t thinking about it for the sake of obscurity. We had been very thinking about it for the sake of the music and the personalities concerned. And as we acquired deeper into it, it was all about getting each copy we may discover.”
When Moore describes these days, he seems like somebody touring again in time to a distant land: “Earlier than the web, earlier than Discogs, earlier than eBay, earlier than something. It was all very legendary,” Moore mentioned.
“We knew that it was obscure,” Moore mentioned of his obsession with free jazz that drove the writing of this “Now Jazz Now.” “We weren’t thinking about it for the sake of obscurity. We had been very thinking about it for the sake of the music and the personalities concerned.”
(Vera Marmelo)
As a younger musician, Moore was thinking about jazz however couldn’t actually make sense of it, so he turned to his buddy Byron Coley for assist. Coley had labored at Rhino Data in California and when he returned to the East Coast he was named the jazz editor of ‘80s hardcore zine Compelled Publicity. Moore believed this was a radical assertion in its personal proper contemplating the scene wasn’t precisely identified for nuance and class.
“I requested him to make me a cassette for tour so I may attempt to decode what was happening right here,” Moore recalled. “He made me 20 and it was each main assertion of recent jazz. I spent a whole tour with headphones on, listening to and falling in love with this music.”
The musician who as soon as spent hours poring over hardcore zines to trace down the newest 7-inch data from bands popping up across the nation like outbreaks in an epidemic now turned his mania towards jazz.
“I began gathering the data on tour,” Moore mentioned. “I used to be going into each report retailer. in search of Solar Ra data. On the time, they had been a dime a dozen. … Even within the early ’90s, in sure school city report shops, they had been like a buck every.” Right now, a few of these authentic pressings go for hundreds of {dollars}.
Rounding out the trio is Gustafsson, a bona fide jazz musician, a wizard with a saxophone with deep feeling and unbridled enthusiasm. Right here he’s describing a collaboration between Eric Dolphy and Ron Carter: “It’s free. It’s lovely. It’s humorous even! It freaks me out! Give me my mind again!”
“We every have a definite writing type,” Moore acknowledged, however “we additionally wished to guarantee that our knowledge was right. So we’re being very anal and geeky about which session got here at which period and which gamers had been at which session. It turns into virtually like a James Elroy novel with all these characters.”
The viewers for these data had been passionate however small, so by necessity the recordings had been usually do-it-yourself affairs. “It jogged my memory quite a lot of what me about punk rock early on,” Moore mentioned, “that it was music made outdoors of the permissions of the company report world. … That, to me, was actually fascinating. It was an artist-run scene.”
Then there’s the music itself, which was past avant-garde. Innovative was the start line. When Moore talks about these artists and their music, it’s like he’s describing a spiritual expertise: “It’s like a sonic increase from the primary groove,” Moore mentioned of Peter Brötzmann’s “Machine Gun.” It’s simply this saxophone blaring via what seems like a distorted snare head. It’s so radical. It’s an excellent piece of noise music, however it’s free jazz, and it’s not even following the buildings of what you understand to be correct jazz conduct. It’s one thing else totally.”
“Now Jazz Now”
(Ecstatic Peace Library)
Or, as Coley quips, “‘Machine Gun’ is usually the primary report I play for punk listeners seeking to open their holes a bit.”
The authors are so passionate concerning the undertaking that the toughest half wasn’t writing the e book however deciding what to depart out.
“We had about 500 extra data that we needed to parse off the record,” Moore admitted. “We had quite a lot of debates and arguments about which data had been going to be within the e book and shunting sure ones apart and so we created a contenders record, which we’ll in all probability put up on a devoted web site on-line. ‘In the event you like these 100 data, and when you’ve processed them, right here’s 500 extra that you need to actually, actually take heed to!’”
Naturally, among the concepts Moore was listening to on these data and seeing in golf equipment on the Decrease East Aspect started to form his personal understanding of improvised music. “After I realized how extremely liberating and delightful that was, it was throughout for me. I began taking part in far more in another way after that. My guitar taking part in actually modified. It allowed me to really feel assured in expressing myself in a approach that had completely no shackle to it.”
Does this imply that Moore has traded in his axe for a sax?
Hardly. Moore continues to be writing songs, making data, and taking part in reveals. Final 12 months he launched a brand new solo album — “Circulation Important Lucidity” — and dropped a brand new single simply final summer time. He can be acting at Large Ears Competition in Knoxville, Tenn., on March 28, 2026.
“I’m a songwriter. I like writing songs. I like writing experimental pop songs,” Moore mentioned. “I’m going out with my band and I play typical band gigs, however I want being in a basement with a free jazz drummer any day of the week.”
Ruland is the creator of “Company Rock Sucks: The Rise and Fall of SST Data.” His new novel, “Mightier than the Sword,” can be printed subsequent 12 months by Uncommon Fowl.
