By Ferruccio Martinotti
"All Art Has Been Contemporary”
This sentence is a neon installation by conceptual artist Maurizio Nannucci located on the roof of the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Torino, that takes up a similar concept expressed a few decades earlier by Pablo Picasso. Such a fundamental axiom, around which rivers of ink have been spilled, seems to lose its actualization in the late '70s, early '80s, with regard to jazz: this art form is out of sync with the “here and now” and doesn't dialogue with contemporary, ontologically expressed by young generations. Totally deprived of any chance to become aware of free/improv artists, the teens of the time (your humble writer among them) relate to jazz in the same way they approach Dante, Seneca or Milton in highschool or uni: respect, awe, in some cases sincere passion, more often distance. Wright or wrong, a matter of fact. Moreover, those years were destined to write one of the brightest chapters in the Great Book of Music, through amazing groups like Clock DVA, PIL, Joy Division, Talking Heads, Pere Ubu, X, Television, Bad Brains, Wire, just to throw out some names in bulk. Would it have made sense to spend the very little bucks in our pocket on Chet Baker instead of Meat Puppets and Husker Du? C’mon, a no-brainer. This inexhaustible cornucopia of punk/post-punk gems experiences a small, apparently insignificant, intermittence, which leads us, aboard the only ISO-certified Time Machine (the music), to where almost everything happens: New York. Here, while the ruins of CBGB's and Max's Kansas City are still smoking, a patrol of sappers (Contortions, Mars, DNA, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks), pushing far beyond punk, lights up the charges of the “No Wave”, generating a shockwave that transcends the scope of music and involves the most extremist artistic fringes of the East Village and the Lower East Side: poets (Lydia Lunch), writers (Kathy Acker), painters (Basquiat) and filmmakers (Eric Mitchell, Amos Poe) are up for It. Among them, relocated from Minnesota, John Lurie, iconic muse actor from Jim Jarmusch’s early movies, who in his unmissable autobiography, The History of Bones, offers us a snapshot of that sparkling, bohemian milieu: “We were so sure of ourselves, we never doubted anything. We were powerful, intelligent, energetic, confident, self-centered, and incredibly naive. Nothing outside our fourteen-block radius mattered. From Houston to 14th St., from the Bowery to Ave. A, that was the only universe.” John alternates between filmmaking and musical practicing, not on a third-hand Telecaster or on a battered Precision bass, but on alto saxophone: "At 4 p.m. on Main Street in Worcester, Massachusetts, the universe gave me my first saxophone. Nothing special happened, except that a man, driving around with a wheelbarrow, gave me a saxophone. I became like a monk. I slept on the floor, I didn't have a TV, I didn't smoke, I didn't drink, I didn't fuck. I played the saxophone until my fingers bled and I devoured music: Varese, Stravinsky, Mingus, Dolphy, Monk, Bird, Ornette, Hendrix." From there, it was a short step to form a band, and with his brother Evan on keyboards, the rhythm section of Steve Piccolo and Anton Fier (of Feelies “fame”), and the abrasive guitar of DNA’s Arto Lindsay (a very distinctive element of the ensemble), the Lounge Lizards were born, self-described, out of respect for the Masters of the Past, as "fake jazz." The Purists, losers by definition, take the bait and move on, while those with heart and soul stop, listen to and understand the new hybridization of tradition with the metro, iconoclastic, infectious, no-sounds: a sabotage of the “status quo ante” of jazz but, definitively, a Sabotage of Love. None of them graduated from Juilliard (does it matter?), but the Lizards' sound reflects like few others the zeitgeist of Downtown and the mood of those courageous and visionary prime movers who animate it. Their debut album was released in 1981, packaged with Peter Saville's splendid artwork, featuring a black-and-white photo of the musicians on the cover that always reminds us of Jimmy Giuffre's stunning "Free Fall". At the helm, the mighty Teo Macero who infuses the album with the nocturnal atmospheres that made it legendary, sitting the listener at the bar counter of Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks At Diner" or amidst a Raymond Chandler novel. The quick band’s development during the couple of years preceding it is captured on "Live 79-81," a reissue of the 1985 Roir cassette, containing live recordings at Hurrah and CBGB's in New York (June, August 1979), Her Majesty's Theater in London (June 1980), Cleveland Radio (June 1981), and Berlin Jazz Festival (December 1981). It's all there: contractions and swing, dissonances and post-post-bop, Earl Hagan (Harlem Nocturne) and Monk (Epistrophy), boredom and coolness, dark streets and streetlights. Jazz in its pure form. Did Lounge Lizards change the course of events? No. Did they spearhead a new musical stream? No. Did they contribute to ensuring that kids who grew up on punk could relate to jazz in an updated and conscious way? ABSOLUTELY YES. Same as it happened to John Lurie just some years before, then let him have the final words to come full circle: “When I was 17, someone made me listen to John Coltrane and it was as if he was speaking to me in Chinese. But how? Is there music I can't understand? And so I started listening to it all the time.”
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