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 laborious stuff: wailing saxophones, arrhythmic bass strains, drums that observe beats so out of time they could as properly 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 biggest 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 guide: “Now Jazz Now: 100 Essential 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 guide 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 College of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa College in Boulder, Colo.
Nonetheless, the guide covers what he and his co-authors think about the 100 biggest information by artists each legendary and obscure. “Now Jazz Now” is greater than a group of biggest hits, it’s the chronicling of a decades-long obsession with free jazz between “three record geeks who are really into collecting,” Moore stated by way of Zoom from his residence in London final month.
In a way, the guide started again within the ’80s when Coley, Gustafsson and Moore began amassing these unusual recorded paperwork in experimental sound at a time when these information have been laborious to search out and even tougher to analysis.
“We knew that it was obscure,” Moore stated. “We weren’t interested in it for the sake of obscurity. We were very interested in it for the sake of the music and the personalities involved. And as we got deeper into it, it was all about getting every copy we could find.”
When Moore describes these days, he feels like somebody touring again in time to a distant land: “Before the internet, before Discogs, before eBay, before anything. It was all very mythical,” Moore stated.
“We knew that it was obscure,” Moore stated of his obsession with free jazz that drove the writing of this “Now Jazz Now.” “We weren’t interested in it for the sake of obscurity. We were very interested in it for the sake of the music and the personalities involved.”
(Vera Marmelo)
As a younger musician, Moore was taken with jazz however couldn’t actually make sense of it, so he turned to his buddy Byron Cole for assist. Cole 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 Forced Exposure. Moore believed this was a radical statement in its own right considering the scene wasn’t precisely identified for nuance and class.
“I asked him to make me a cassette for tour so I could try to decode what was going on here,” Moore recalled. “He made me 20 and it was every major statement of modern jazz. I spent an entire 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 information from bands popping up across the nation like outbreaks in an epidemic now turned his mania towards jazz.
“I started collecting the records on tour,” Moore stated. “I was going into every record store. looking for Sun Ra records. At the time, they were a dime a dozen. … Even in the early ’90s, in certain college town record stores, they were like a buck each.” 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 is free. It is beautiful. It is funny even! It freaks me out! Give me my brain back!”
“We each have a distinct writing style,” Moore acknowledged, however “we also wanted to make sure that our data was correct. So we’re being very anal and geeky about which session came at which time and which players were at which session. It becomes almost like a James Elroy novel with all these characters.”
The viewers for these information have been passionate however small, so by necessity the recordings have been usually do-it-yourself affairs. “It reminded me a lot of what interested me about punk rock early on,” Moore stated, “that it was music made outside of the permissions of the corporate record world. … That, to me, was really interesting. It was an artist-run scene.”
Then there’s the music itself, which was past avant-garde. Leading edge 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 boom from the first groove,” Moore stated of Peter Brötzmann’s “Machine Gun.” It’s simply this saxophone blaring by what feels like a distorted snare head. It’s so radical. It’s an amazing piece of noise music, but it surely’s free jazz, and it’s not even following the buildings of what you realize to be correct jazz conduct. It’s one thing else completely.”
“Now Jazz Now”
(Ecstatic Peace Library)
Or, as Coley quips, “‘Machine Gun’ is often the first record I play for punk listeners looking to open their holes a bit.”
The authors are so passionate concerning the venture that the toughest half wasn’t writing the guide however deciding what to depart out.
“We had about 500 more records that we had to parse off the list,” Moore admitted. “We had a lot of debates and arguments about which records were going to be in the book and shunting certain ones aside and so we created a contenders list, which we’ll probably put up on a dedicated site online. ‘If you like these 100 records, and once you’ve processed them, here’s 500 more that you should really, really listen to!’”
Naturally, a number of the concepts Moore was listening to on these information and seeing in golf equipment on the Decrease East Facet started to form his personal understanding of improvised music. “When I realized how incredibly liberating and beautiful that was, it was all over for me. I started playing much more differently after that. My guitar playing really changed. It allowed me to feel confident in expressing myself in a way that had absolutely 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 information, and taking part in reveals. Final yr he launched a brand new solo album — “Flow Critical Lucidity” — and dropped a brand new single simply final summer season. He shall be acting at Massive Ears Competition in Knoxville, Tenn., on March 28, 2026.
“I’m a songwriter. I like writing songs. I like writing experimental pop songs,” Moore stated. “I go out with my band and I play typical band gigs, but I prefer being in a basement with a free jazz drummer any day of the week.”
Ruland is the creator of “Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise and Fall of SST Records.” His new novel, “Mightier than the Sword,” shall be printed subsequent yr by Uncommon Hen.
