Bending Ears With Mary Halvorson

Originally published in the New York Sun in 2006.

Though she’s only half-way into her first beer of the night, it’s enough to loosen a confession from Mary Halvorson. The 26-year-old guitarist is becoming one of the most frequently spotted instrumentalists on the new music scene. She gigs in a variety of combos and formats at venues as upscale as The Iridium, where she’ll join the avant-garde composer Anthony Braxton for a week of shows in March, as part of his “Ghost Trance” ensemble. Yet, her more intrepid listeners may find her under the radar at spots like the Asterisk Art Project, a collective loft space in an old Bushwick warehouse. Though steeped in jazz, Ms. Halvorson belongs to a generation of young musicians who pay about as much attention to genre definitions as they do borough lines. She plays guitar in a way that fractures conventions, restlessly inventing her own paradigms.

So, while having the inevitable conversation about influences, Ms. Halvorson dutifully namechecks demigods from Jimi Hendrix, whose “Little Wing” she first tackled when she picked up a guitar at age 12, to Thelonious Monk, the pianist whose elliptical swerve may be a more profound resource for contemporary guitarists than most six-string legends. But, Ms. Halvorson admits, the first song she learned all the way through was also the most obvious: “Stairway to Heaven.”

“I think of myself as a guitar player,” she said, grinning only slightly sheepishly, as she perched on a barstool at the Parkside Lounge one recent evening. Ms. Halvorson was between sets nearby at The Stone, the Avenue C performance space whose February bookings she curated and where she will perform a few more times this month. “I’m not really concerned whether something is rock or jazz, I just want to play something that’s interesting to me.”

There’s a lot that interests her. You can hear Ms. Halvorson in so many different modes. She can shred, as she does with bassist Trevor Dunn’s Trio Convulsant. She can play smooth and nearly stately compositions that evoke some of Steely Dan’s elegant studio jazziness, as she does with Ted Reichmann’s combo My Ears Are Bent. She’s a brisk thinker in improvisatory settings, unleashing a pointillistic spree of single notes as easily as she might concoct an unexpectedly beguiling melodic fragment, a knack she displayed recently in a duo with a former teacher, the innovative guitarist Joe Morris, at the Stone. And she sings, in a duo called People, with drummer Kevin Shea, and a separate pairing with her best friend, the viola player Jessica Pavone, whom she joins tonight for a set at the Stone.

“It’s definitely my most important project,” Ms. Halvorson said, recalling that, like many important things, the duo began as a kind of lark. One day while rehearsing, the women decided to each bring some lyrics to try out the next day. “We both ended up writing the same sort of thing. We can read each other’s minds. When we rehearse we’re usually checking out an episode of ‘The Sopranos,’ getting press stuff together for the next tour, and making dinner. It’s all the same thing. We’re very efficient.”

That spirit of playful nonchalance, along with the pair’s disarming alto voices, made the 2006 release “Prairies” (Lucky Kitchen) one of the year’s stealthier treats: the kind of CD fans would only buy from one of the women after a show, then play incessantly. It reveals talented musicians with a lot of ideas kicking around upstairs. The vibe shifts from bittersweet chamber reveries, paced by Ms. Pavone’s eloquent bowing and Ms. Halvorson’s heady scrambles, towards a particularly feminine humor. “Sometimes/ When you are talking to me/I don’t hear/A thing that you say,” they sing on “Sometimes,” each syllable enunciated as if part of an exercise, harmonies rising like arched eyebrows.

Trumpeter Peter Evans, part of a new wave of exceptional players churning up the city’s jazz and improv circuit, recalls Ms. Halvorson as forming her sound early on. They met as teenagers at a weekend jazz program at the New England Conservatory in Boston, not far from Brookline, where the guitarist grew up. “Mary sounded pretty much the same then as she does now,” Mr. Evans said, “which in a relatively straight ahead jazz context was a little jarring. She would play these very pretty voicings and melodies, but her solos were really twisted and angular with huge interval leaps and jagged rhythms.”

The guitarist also wins praise from Mr. Morris, whose contemporaries began staking out their turf in the late 1970s and early1980s. Decades
after the so-called “free improv” scene became codified, he views Ms. Halvorson as part of a welcome arrival to talent pool that has been male-dominated. “It’s about time a woman was given credit for making some new music on the guitar,” he said. “Mary has what it takes to be that woman.”

What’s refreshing is that gender is much less of an issue now. “When I was learning, no one would take me seriously because I was a girl,” Ms. Halvorson said. “If  we’re going to get rid of the whole sexism problem, we need not to draw attention to those differences. That’s how I try to approach it. It’s going in the right direction.”

Berne, Baby, Berne

New York jazz in the 1990s spawned some monstrously good working bands, outfits so keenly focused that they could trigger the transcendental glimmer of highly skilled players in burning improvisatory flux. Depending on your taste, those bands could have been Joshua Redman’s quartet with pianist Brad Mehldau, John Zorn’s all-star Masada, the David S. Ware Quartet, or Bloodcount – formed by alto saxophonist Tim Berne in 1992.

RED BLOODED: Alto saxophonist Tim Berne has revived Bloodcount.

Bloodcount, which featured Jim Black, drums, Michael Formanek, bass, and Chris Speed on tenor, was a percolating laboratory for Mr. Berne’s complex and detailed compositions. It wasn’t unusual for a Bloodcount piece to last a half-hour. If the notion implied high-minded severity, that was never the case in practice. Even at its gnarliest, the music conveyed a sense of adventure and risk, rewarding the attentive with intriguing structures, surprising depths of soulfulness, and spirited interactions between the players, whose roles might revolve like a Calder mobile. Besides, there were Mr. Berne’s titles, which brimmed with his peculiar wit: “Sense and Sinsemilla,” “Yes, Dear,” “Scrap Metal.”

“I always find that people like my bands a lot more after I stop doing it,” Mr. Berne said. “But if something becomes successful, I move on and see if I can work something else out. Once it gets to the point that no one is complaining, I get nervous.” That explains why he broke up Bloodcount in 1999. After what he cautiously estimated as a “billion” gigs, Mr. Berne said he could no longer compose for the band’s instrumentaton. Now, almost a decade later, he began hearing some different music for the same group. Bloodcount marked its return to the stage this year with an ongoing series of clubdates, during which
the six-foot-four Mr. Berne likes to play in his stockinged feet, avant-casual. “You can reinvent an old band by writing new stuff and starting fresh,” he explained. “I didn’t want to do it as a retrospective.”

For that, fans can check out “Seconds.” The new CD/DVD release, on Mr. Berne’s Screwgun label, features two discs of vintage Bloodcount live recordings and a 1994 concert video from Paris, shot by Susanna Schonberg, that reflects the energies of the performance in a restless montage of extreme close-ups and offstage passages. But the music Bloodcount has now begun to play sounds much different than that, Mr. Berne promised, chatting recently from his home in Park Slope, where he has lived since the 1980s. (“The downtown scene?” he said, as if cocking an eyebrow.
“I’m a Brooklyn guy.”) “My writing changed a lot when I started writing for keyboards,” he said, referring to an ongoing affiliation with the pianist and electronic composer Craig Taborn, who plays in Mr. Berne’s trio Hard Cell and alongside him in a quartet with guitarist David Torn. “There’s certain rhythmic stuff, certain harmonies. I guess rhythmically more than anything, and the counterpoint is stranger.”

Mr. Berne was a late-bloomer musically. He didn’t pick up a horn until he was 19 or 20, excited by the countless gigs he attended
at bustling mid-1970s haunts like Studio Rivbea and Slug’s. One day he sprained his ankle, and purchased a $200 alto saxophone to help him kill time. His astute taste in mentors proved exceptionally fortunate. Mr. Berne’s favorite musician was Julius Hemphill, the visionary saxophonist and composer (“Dogon, A.D.,” “Long Tongues”) who proved open to taking on a completely green student. “I started making music because I saw him doing it,” Mr. Berne said. “I was pretty naïve for quite a long time. I started as a bandleader by default. It’s a good thing I learned how to do it early on, and I learned how to put out records. I just had to learn music.”

Now 53, the saxophonist honed his chops and had a contract with Columbia Records in 1986, even though he was working a much different line than the label’s loudly touted jazz star, Wynton Marsalis. The deal only lasted for two albums, but Mr. Berne became fast friends with its graphic designer, Steven Byram, and began a long artistic partnership. (Mr. Byram creates all of the amusingly abstract design for the saxophonist’s CDs, which upend the dry and amateurish norm for avant-garde jazz packaging).

“I just want to own the stuff, I don’t know if it makes any difference,” Mr. Berne said. He’s been marketing his own discs since 1996, with 19 titles available on his website – www.screwgunrecords.com. During a short spell a few years ago, he became ambitious about running an indie label, but burned out on the effort involved. Lately, he’s tried to take advantage of MP3 technology. “Today I sold six downloads!” he said, with an air of mock pride. More common, he lamented, was learning how easily his performances could be acquired elsewhere. “It’s hard to sell stuff because everyone gets it for free. I was talking to a friend in Europe after we did some shows in Barcelona and Budapest and he had already listened to the gig, 24 hours after we played it.”

As for the recharged Bloodcount, Mr. Berne advised to expect the unexpected. His recent European tour with Mr. Torn, whose music is dense and boiling, yielded precisely the response that he thrives on. “About 20 percent of the audience was shocked,” he said. “We weren’t preaching to the choir. Some like you, and some don’t, and you get a kind of tension. That first year or two with a band is really different than the rest of the time. Nobody knows the music – including me.”

Perhaps the only thing for certain is that Mr. Berne’s new pieces will stretch out at their leisure. There’s a good reason he prefers extended compositions, he said.

“I never liked to talk.”

Visions of Joanna

Material originally published in vastly different contexts in Time Out Chicago and Stomp & Stammer.

I don’t know freak-folk from a funky chicken, but I can tell you that Joanna Newsom is an original: a one-of-a-kind wondermint whose far-strung stringed jingling is epic and arty in a way that skirts the usual idea of “epic” and “arty.” Which is to say, how do you fabricate a mini-opus like Ys (Drag City), her new album, fill it with allegorical star-swept illuminations, furry creatures whose hearts thump as big as the moon, and some of the most nakedly rapturous and soulfully turbulent singing since, seriously, Astral Weeks, and not come off a tad… overdone? I’m not going to mention, just now, that Newsom plays harp – the ornate, whopping Celtic kind, so evocative of angels in 1930s Hollywood musicals and new age frim-frammery -  or that she hired the justifiably legendary Van Dyke Parks, the greatest living quirky genius arranger, to help score her songs, with their umpteen verses, and their marvelous turns of tongue, and their nearly archaic embrace of language as a forgotten kingdom. As such, Ys (Eeees!) seems to have less to do with contemporary pop as it does with, say, Chaucer, or the Farmer’s Almanac. Or just, you know, the brimming viaducts of your own pellucid dreams. All done up with a 30-piece orchestra.

I caught Joanna waiting in line at a Northern California supermarket, and when I checked back a few minutes later, as she motored home, she gave a pretty generous illustration of how she could seemingly indulge some crazily ambitious creative urges without becoming self-indulgent – which is why the rich and arousing beauty of Ys, as sweeping and demanding as it is, makes me think of Van Morrison at first blush and not, oh, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.

And so we began…

Joanna Newsom: I’m throwing a big surprise birthday party for my parents tomorrow, and got it into my mind I needed certain things, but for some reason it was ten times busier than usual at the grocery store. I was standing in that line, looking at my cell phone. Damn it, damn it!

Ha ha. So… do you still live in Nevada City?

Yeah.

What’s it like there? You’re close to Reno?

It’s not terribly close. It’s still like an hour from the border. It’s near the California side of Lake Tahoe, right up in the foothills before the mountains. We live near all the ski resorts in Northern California, right at the base of all that. Just a really small town. For some reason it’s a real creative haven.

Like a California hippie town?

I think what happened is there was an exodus from the Bay Area. Some people went to Marin County, in the mid-’70s, when a lot of the artistic community got disillusioned with what was happening in San Francisco. It got dark. A lot of things got dark there. And a lot of the people who were creative started going all sorts of places. This is one kind of outpost. A lot of writers, and composers and poets came here, and bought a bunch of property. You could buy property really cheaply back then. So there’s a lot of people with 100-acre, 200- acre plots of land.

Your parents were part of that?

They came later. They came in ’80s. They were both physicians. In some ways they are super-close connected with that stuff, especially my mom. She’s very radical, a very political person, very into protesting and organizing and having a lot of causes. But, in other ways, they were removed from all that. They joked that they missed the ’60s, because they were in medical school the whole time. So they only got to do the not-so-fun things… [Joanna trills!]: Oh Hiiii! [Then back] I just got home and my aunt and uncle are here. It’s complete madness. We have 90 relatives coming in and it’s at my house.

I thought it was interesting to see that the fabled minimalist composer Terry Riley was one of your neighbors.

He’s a neighbor in the sense that everyone is a neighbor here because the town is so small. We didn’t live next door to each other. I don’t live up there. I grew up across the river.

Years later, you ended up at Mills College in Berkeley. Which is the kind of place Terry Riley would teach, if he hasn’t taught there.

Going to Mills was definitely a decision influenced by Terry Riley. A lot of what I did musically for awhile took place within a framework that was partially defined by what I saw him doing. I wanted to write music and make music, because that was what I loved doing most of all. But just about the only person I knew of who did that as their job was Terry Riley. The fact that he had connections to Mills was one of the motivating factors for me to go there.

Have you ever had his hot sauce?

[Exuberant] No. [Laughs]

He makes a killer hot sauce. It’s just great stuff.

[Laughs]. That’s pretty awesome. No, I’ve never had it.

Well, if you get a chance … So, you kind of grew up and gravitated to Mills. Is that where you got most of your training?

It’s where I got a lot of one particular kind of training. That was the first time I approached writing music from a formal perspective. I’d been writing music my whole life, but I thought of what I was doing as composing. Because of the simple distinction that I wasn’t signing, so they couldn’t be songs. I really formalized it in my own mind when I went to Mills and attempted to be more experimental. Experimental for me is so much less experimental than anybody else at that school. Oh, my lightbulb just went out! My last remaining lightbulb in my kitchen just burned out.

That’s very rock star.

Yeah! Ha ha! I just feel bad, because this is ostensibly the center of the action for tomorrow’s party. But I’m a complete wreck. I’ve been traveling non-stop since I bought my house. Some rooms are empty and some rooms are cluttered beyond like, beyond neatening, and all my bulbs are burned out, and cheery aunts and uncles are just rolling in, and being like, “Where can I store this ham?” and “Here’s some harvest-themed centerpieces for your table!” I’m like, what tables? It will be very interesting. I’m going to need lightbulbs that work in the house by tomorrow.

You need candles.

That was one of the things I was getting at the store was candles. I thought, “You must have candles.” Candles alone do not a party make. My house must have light in it. It’s an outdoor party. We bought tiki torches and we rented big propane heaters and tables. It’s a full-on event, and I know people are going to be interested in coming in and seeing my house. It’s going to be the ultimate embarrassment in front of my whole family if I don’t even have a lightbulb that works [laughs].

You have a lot of friends there?

I know everybody. A lot of my really good friends did something similar to me. They went away to go to school or to travel, and have elected to come back. It’s really exciting.

Did you gravitate to harp at college?

I’ve played harp for 16 years! Certainly, when I was at Mills, it came to my attention that I was one of the only people remaining in the school who wrote music on their instrument. Very few people even played instruments anymore. Most people wrote on laptops. Very few people even wrote music involving pitches that the human ear can recognize. Most of it was beyond dissonant. Just noise music. That was the conversation that was going on.
Your record is amazing, but it’s definitely not something you can absorb in even a few listens. It’s a huge piece of work. How did it all come together?

It was the product of a series of instinctive and natural and at the time not very huge-feeling decisions on my part. The first and most simple and probably most formative decision in the whole project was what I wanted to write the songs about. As soon as I knew what I wanted to tackle in the story of the record, I also recognized the requirement that the songs be long. The story would need to be paced in a certain manner. It’s sort of the difference between how certain topics are best-suited for a 100-word blurb, and other topics are best-suited for a 2,000-word essay, and the pacing of your idea will be fundamentally different because of the form you use to discuss it within. I felt it would be vulgar to make them short, and it would be a great disservice to the work I was trying to do. It was an easy decision. It wasn’t intimidating. I didn’t think it was that big of a deal. I was finished with two of the songs, and part-way finished with the other three, at that point I realized it was also going to be required of this record that I involve an orchestra – for all kinds of reasons.

What kind of feeling is that when you realize, oh, darn, I’m gonna need an orchestra now? That must have been a fun phone call to make to the record company.

Yeah, it was sort of like that. I was definitely laughing sheepishly. Dan Koretsky, who runs Drag City, was really, really excited from the get-go. It was still really conceptual. We didn’t know how it was going to work. A few months after that, I got a copy of Van Dyke’s record Song Cycle and, upon hearing it, realized that it was the closest thing I had heard up to that point that approximated the mood and gestures that I wanted the orchestra to be armed with. For the first time, I was encountering somebody’s arrangements that resonated with me on this record, and how I wanted it to sound. I had no idea what a big deal Van Dyke Parks is. I’m talking to the record label [does gee-whiz kid's voice]: “Hey! OK! So I wanna ask Van Dyke Parks to do it.” “Ohhhhhhh, OK. Well, we’ll give it a try.” They said they’d ask him but that it would be maybe difficult for him to do it, and prohibitively expensive. But they were willing to try.

Had you heard him before?

No.

Great.

Only Song Cycle. And basically nothing before that.

None of the Beach Boys stuff?

I didn’t know that he had been involved in that. I guess I had heard him before, without knowing it was him. I didn’t know about Smile. I had never heard of that. I remember seeing that name everywhere, but I didn’t realize what had gone into that record. Yeah, so we … It all took place in the course of one roadtrip. At the beginning of that roadtrip my boyfriend gave me a copy of that record and told me, “You need to listen to this.” And I heard it, and fell in love with it, and called Drag City. And by the time the roadtrip ended up in LA, Van Dyke and his wife came to a hotel room that I had, and I rented a harp, and they came and sweetly introduced themselves, and perched on the edge of the bed, and listened to me play my songs. Van Dyke, he was so immediately receptive and expressed such immediate interest, that I immediately felt like it wasn’t going to happen. I was sure nothing would come of it. But true to his word, he was involved from there on out. It was a really long process …

The vocals, which you recorded separately with Steve Albini, are really intense. The emotions.

The whole thing was really, really emotional for me. There’s one song I can’t even listen to my own performance of, I can hear certain places where I was starting to cry and it makes me feel so weird. I still think it’s valuable in terms of honesty and authenticity to have that preserved, even though there’s the hugely formal, lush, bombastic orchestral presence. So it was good to have that division. And when I was finished, I could set it aside. That was months before the album was done, and I went into a different part of my brain, a very critical one. I’m very difficult to work with!

How was Van Dyke to work with?

He was amazing. He was very graceful about recognizing how specific my vision for the record was. And he humored me in that doggedness, despite the fact that I was seldom able to articulate myself in a technical way. So not only was I really stuck on the album sounding a certain way and feeling a certain way, but I didn’t even have the vocabulary to give him any sort of shorthand. It really is a bunch of trial and error. I gave him a pile of notes on the lyrics to help him generate his first draft. Occasionally, I might have said something semi-technical, but usually it was kind of out there. Like, I want this line to evoke this image musically, or I want the trumpets to do this sort of movement, low strings or high strings. I also gave him a 30-page manifesto! I thank him eternally for putting up with all of my shit. Just sort of saying, I want the record to feel this way. I want these certain things to not be sacrificed no matter what. Here’s what I want this album to end up sounding like. I would burn CD-Rs of certain things I liked the arrangements of, which he promptly disregarded. He listened to them and he appreciated them, but he also thought it would not be helpful for us to work in that way. And then he started Draft No. 1. He would send things to me usually in the recorded form of a cheesy old synthesizer. Some music program on his computer that hadn’t been updated in 15 years. That was beautiful. He’d send his drafts to me, and I would tear them apart. And they were exquisite! The struggle revolved around making his arrangements do exactly what I needed them to do for these particular songs…and resonate for him and for me as the product of our ideas. I’m really, really bad at giving up any kind of musical control. And he was hugely graceful and patient and full of so many ideas. He was a joy to work with. He didn’t always give in. He would interpret my criticisms in his particular way. We’d get into arguments about certain choices, and he would sometimes win, and in every case that he won the argument I had always been glad that he did. Like, I didn’t want electric guitar or bass on this record and he had Lee Sklar and…

Yeah, I’m looking at some of these names and it’s like the LA session posse. It’s your Steely Dan record.

Hee hee hee hee. My Yacht Rock record! They’re all such incredibly sensitive players and they gave us a lot to work with. When I sat down with Jim O’Rourke (to mix the record), we cut a lot of that stuff out, as they had expected we would. Their goal was to give us raw material to use where we needed it. In the sections we used those instruments, it contributed so much to the record. The arrangements are so complicated sometimes, that I think the record really benefited from the grounding force of bass and guitar substantiating the chord changes. In a weird way it made it sound like a folk record, because it backed up the idea of chord changes.

If someone hadn’t heard the record, how would you describe the story?

It’s hugely autobiographical but, then, it’s a fictional narrative. It was an effort on my part to organize and score and make some sense of and articulate my reaction to a year of my life that was a very hard year. I mean, obviously, there are overt enough references to mortality on the record, it’s clear that’s a huge thing. There was a lot of death that was rough for me, but also other kinds of death. And some really, really good things that happened, too. And all those things in the process of poeticizing them. Ahhh, in the process of organizing them lyrically and musically, these things started to spookily assert this kind of synchronicity and a real shape. Almost like there was a causal relationship between all these things that happened. Each thing that happened created the environment in which the next thing happened. In my mind there was five steps to the story. One thing that was really important to me, and I really made sure this was the case, every lyrical line means something really, really specific to me. There’s no arbitrariness. No saying something because it sounds good. Every single line is an effort to be completely truthful and to say something in a certain way. At the same time, it’s not hugely important to me that anyone else “get” the story.

Well, “hydrocephalitic listlessness” has a different meaning to every person.

But it’s also an image. It’s supposed to be immediately accessible. It’s supposed to mean having a head that’s full of an excess of water. That’s a flower. It’s also an image of decadence and excessiveness and fertility and fecundity and laziness and all these things that have direct parallels to the story, the actual story, but also have a certain value as images.

Do you feel you absorb a lot of things and it just comes out? People are always analyzing Bob Dylan and finding things. Are you inspired by something else, or do you try to write without worrying about other existing ways of writing?

Probably the most honest answer to that is that I obsess over structure but I don’t think about it in the context of anyone else’s work, especially with this project. I don’t even know what to compare it to. The only thing I was influenced by on some level, in storytelling I guess, was <I>The Sound and the Fury<$>, by Faulkner. Only in that there’s one story that book aspires to tell, and the different angles from which the story is told are so incredibly different, and each character except for the final passage, the first three sections involve people doggedly running in circles around particular obsessions. There are psychological hiccups they can’t free themselves from, but the loops and the circles sort of take on this particular shape, and all of these characters together, their different obsessive running – the shape that those things form in relief is sort of the story, you know?

The NY Sun Files: Gary Panter

Published Sept. 15, 2006.

Gary Panter is explicating a painting that hangs in the attic studio of his Brooklyn home.”There’s a villain from a Japanese TV show,” the artist says, gesturing toward one menacing visage, which floats in a cosmic soup of images. “And that’s, like, a 1950s robot. And that’s a made-up tentacle brain monster.” The canvas, which radiates a sickly green, is also populated with a bikiniclad beach babe, an exaggerated cartoon puppy with its tongue sticking out, and a disembodied skull — among many other symbols, resonant with subconscious anxiety and desire.

“They’re about primal issues,” Mr. Panter admits quite cheerfully. “And the stupid way the sexes see each other. All those horrible clichés. It’s about people standing right next to their wishes and fears.”

Mr. Panter’s vivid obsessions make him one of the stars of “Masters of American Comics,”a two-part exhibition that opens today.The show, which features 14 artists and spans the history of the medium, is so large that it takes two museums to accommodate it.The comic strips of seminal figures from Windsor McKay (“Little Nemo in Slumberland”) and George Herriman (“Krazy Kat”) to Charles M. Schulz (“Peanuts”) are mounted in the Newark Museum. Meanwhile, the emergence of comic books in the 1950s and, later, underground “comix” and the graphic novel, is represented at the Jewish Museum, where Mr. Panter is joined by contemporaries (Chris Ware, R. Crumb) and artists who preceded him (Jack Kirby, Harvey Kurtzman, Will Eisner).

“It’s like being knighted,” says Mr. Panter, 55, who may still be best-known for his Emmy Award-winning design for “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse,” the subversive 1980s kids show that has found new life on the Cartoon Network and on DVD. “There’s stuff in the show I have idolized since childhood, so just being in the room with it …” his voice trails off. “Is humbling the right word? I’m exhilarated.”

Mr. Panter’s presence in such an exhibit is a sign of the times.It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment when underground comics acquired mainstream legitimacy. Perhaps it was in 1992, when Art Spiegelman, who championed Mr. Panter’s work as the editor of RAW magazine in the early 1980s, won a Pulitzer Prize for his graphic novel “Maus.” (Spiegelman, whose work was part of the “Masters” exhibit first organized by the Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, pulled it from the New York show, citing personal reasons). Or maybe the arrival of “The Simpsons,” a few years earlier, had something to do with it.That show’s creator, Matt Groening, came out of the same alternative media as his friend Mr. Panter (and joins him October 10 for a conversation at the 92nd Street Y).

Mr. Panter, a Brownsville, Texas, native, proudly dubbed “the king of the ratty line,” didn’t begin to draw seriously until after he’d already been painting for some time.

“What’s behind a lot of cartooning is a frustrated, shy person who wants to make something that shouts for them in the world. In the old days, people cartooned because they needed a job, and they started out at 12. I started after college. I remember, I went to see Jack Kirby, and he said [in doubtful voice], ‘Okay, but why are you starting so late?’”

He was lucky, though, to launch his career in Los Angeles during the mid-1970s. The city’s erupting punk rock scene meshed seamlessly with Mr. Panter’s artistic ambitions. His self-described “jaggedy” style made for some memorable Frank Zappa album covers (remember “Studio Tan”?), and found purchase in a local punk ‘zine called Slash, which invited the artist to contribute a comic strip.Thus,”Jimbo” was born: a post-apocalyptic Everyman who wanders the landscape of an imaginary city called Dal Tokyo.

Original panels from Mr. Panter’s magnum opus, “Jimbo in Purgatory,” fill a wall in the Jewish Museum, their shaggy mayhem and chiaroscuro tones offering a strong contrast to the precise, geometric figures and interior wit of Mr. Ware’s work, which shares the room.

“In my mind, I see him as a young Kevin Bacon,” Mr. Panter says of Jimbo, who strides through the densely allusive panels of “Purgatory” amid dialogue lifted from Dante, Boccacio, the Book of Isaiah, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “Two Virgins.”Yul Brynner’s cowboy robot from “Westworld”makes a guest appearance, as does Zappa and a host of other free-associative references — all duly footnoted.

Another room contains a trove of Mr. Crumb’s grumpy, profane, and sexually effusive underground comics, which minted counter-cultural folk heroes like Mr. Natural (“Keep on Truckin’”) and Fritz the Cat. Mr. Crumb’s cracked sense of humor jostles easily with that of Harvey Kurtzman, inventor of “Mad” magazine, whose elbow-in-the-ribs style also had a strong social counterpoint. Panels from his Korean War comic book, “Two Fisted Tales,” relate combat stories with compassion, blunt humor, and even a kind of poetry.

More traditionally, there’s Mr. Kirby, whose cinematic style for the “Fantastic Four” (created with Stan Lee) revolutionized the superhero business and gave Roy Lichtenstein a key source for his paintings. Mr. Eisner, whose “The Spirit” arrived in 1940, a year before Mr. Kirby’s “Captain America,”is also celebrated for introducing adult themes and urban realism to a newspaper comic and anticipating the graphic novels to come.

The exhibit’s deep focus revealingly ties all the artists together, despite their widely divergent styles. But the days of conventional superheroes may now be something more for Hollywood to mine. “There’s a revolution in comics right now,” Mr. Panter said while reflecting on his experiences teaching at Manhattan’s School of Visual Arts. “It’s not just Dungeons and Dragons anymore. There’s all kinds of genres now.More than half of my class is interested in doing their own stories.They want to go struggle.”

As for his own inspiration, though he cites the dystopian science fiction of Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard, and the discordant sound collages he plays on a motley stack of old boomboxes, Mr. Panter only has to flash back to his Texas childhood — and the looming menace of his own imagination.

“I got scared by some kids in monster masks when I was 4,” he says, with a soft chuckle. “My mother said I never got over it.”

The NY Sun Files: Zeena Parkins

Globalism is nothing new for Zeena Parkins. She routinely zigzags between New York, where she has lived since 1985, and various concert dates in Europe and behind what used to be the Iron Curtain. Years before Mikhail Gorbachev was implored to tear down the Berlin Wall, American avantgardists were burrowing underneath it. Two decades on, Ms. Parkins — a one-of-a-kind musician who composes and improvises on electric harp — may play an electronic music festival in Moscow one night, come back home, then fly back for a gig in Lithuania.

“I have my bag of toys that literally expands or contracts depending on how far I’m going,” Ms. Parkins, who also employs various keyboards, samplers, acoustic harps, and a Foley setup in her performances, said. Getting through JFK airport can sometimes be a challenge, but nothing in her travels prepared her for her biggest and most recent move: across the East River from downtown Manhattan to Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

“I got kicked out,” she said recently, sitting at a 1950s modern dining table in a nook of her new apartment, with a sunny view of a garden and the waterfront a few blocks away. A Brooklynite for all of two days when we spoke, Ms. Parkins was catching her breath before another long trip. “I don’t even know where the coffee shop is where I’m supposed to meet someone later.”

If Ms. Parkins feels a bit symbolic — part of an artistic diaspora that has accompanied the real estate boom in lower Manhattan — at least she is accustomed to thinking fast on her feet. It’s a major part of her process. She has become to the harp, an instrument that suffers from an antiquated image, what Jimi Hendrix was to the electric guitar: She plays it in ways no one has ever thought to, and extracts sounds — often manipulated in mid-strum — that have never been imagined.

Whether her soundscapes evoke pyrotechnic frenzies or cast lyrically hypnogogic spells, Ms. Parkins compels attention with the swirling ease of her hands at play. She often collaborates with choreographers; presently, she’s working on a piece with John Jasperse that will make its premiere this fall at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave festival. It’s a natural fit: She can make the most immobile of orchestral instruments seem as kinetic as a rocket ship.

Ms. Parkins’s approach, which tends to de-emphasize the harp’s “harpiness,” put her in immediate demand when she first arrived in New York from San Francisco 22 years ago. She began gigging immediately, hooking up with the protean guitarist Fred Frith (with whom she will perform tonight at the Stone) and the late cello player Tom Cora in the trio Skeleton Crew. Over the years, she’s been a versatile collaborator, playing alongside such pop acts as Sonic Youth and Björk, on whose 2001 album “Vespertine” she proved essential.

“I lucked out,” Ms. Parkins said, eager to note that the harp was forced on her while she took music classes at her Detroit high school. “I came to New York and started playing in John Zorn’s game pieces — like ‘Cobra’ and ‘Darts’ — and met Fred and Tom.” She also began working with the percussionist Ikue Mori. A few years ago, the pair formed the band Phantom Orchard, which will perform Friday at the Issue Project Room in Brooklyn.

“With any improvisation, it’s all about being profoundly in the moment and out of the moment,” Ms. Parkins said. “It’s really a moment of inhabiting opposite states. It’s a unique position to be in, and I think it’s taken me a long time to be able to articulate that. You can say: ‘I don’t know what happens.’ But it’s much more than that.”

Her work with Ms. Mori actually comes closer to the song form — or what the duo calls songs. The partnership has evolved such that Ms. Parkins handles the hardware — an array of keyboards, her harps, and various baubles — and Ms. Mori peddles the software, conjuring homemade percussive samples on her laptop and projecting short films she has made.

The duo’s performance this week will take advantage of a 16-channel speaker array installed at the Issue Project Room, a former oil silo adjacent to the Gowanus Canal. The venue will move at the end of June, according to its director, Suzanne Fiol, due partly to landlord issues but also because a pending shutdown of the canal will turn the area into “a rat-infested garbage bath.” The show will be one of the last at what has been one of the city’s most distinctive performance spaces, although Ms. Fiol intends to continue at a new Brooklyn address in July.

“We’ve never played there,” Ms. Parkins said. “So it will be a first and a last. It’s not often that Ikue and I are here at the same time, so it’s nice to play for our friends in New York.”

Speaking of final shows, the recent closing of the Lower East Side experimental music club Tonic has sent a chill through Ms. Parkins and many of her peers. It’s the first time in more than a decade that Manhattan has lacked a sizable venue catering to the amorphous avant-garde scene, which is most visibly championed by Mr. Zorn’s tiny nonprofit club, the Stone.

“It’s kind of inexcusable that the city can’t support it,” she said. “Hopefully, this is some kind of strange transitory moment. It’s an economic problem and it has to do with greed and all those tall buildings going up downtown.”

Ms. Parkins, who still manages to keep a rehearsal studio in Manhattan, is nonetheless happy to embrace Brooklyn. She’s carved such a singular niche for herself, that the relative inconvenience of the G train will not impede her career. “If you want that thing I do, you know where to go,” she said with a laugh. “You thought it was in Manhattan, but check that new address.”

The NY Sun Files: Sunn O)))

Heavy metal is a joke. Right? Its eldritch trappings, thudding chords, and gothic pomp make it an easy target for sympathetic parody, from Spinal Tap to Tenacious D. Yet the really funny thing is that “the metal,” as Jack Black calls it, has stealthily morphed into a new kind of art music.

“I’m really inspired by the aesthetic and spirit of jazz, like Miles Davis in the late ’60s and early ’70s,” said the guitarist Greg Anderson, who forms Sunn O))), the leading exponent of underground metal, along with fellow guitarist Stephen O’Malley. “I love the freedom of that music, the concept of pushing boundaries.”

Mr. Anderson, whose shoulder-length black hair and beard would certainly fit the period, also runs a record label, Southern Lord, which has released 70 albums since 1998. To expand on the jazz connection, the Los Angeles-based label seems to represent for the most creative factions of metal what the fabled Blue Note label did for jazz in the 1960s. Unlike Blue Note, however, which recorded both avant-garde landmarks and hard-bop standards, Southern Lord’s most popular releases tend to be its most far out. They fall into a loose category that fans call “stoner doom.”

Doom’s glacial tempos take their cues from Black Sabbath, often simulating the blurry consciousness experienced by marijuana smokers. But then it begins to free-associate, veering toward psychedelia, hypnotic drones, and a feedback-laden wash of impure sound that roots in the ambient experiments of Brian Eno and the minimalist throb of 1960s innovators like Tony Conrad and La Monte Young.

“We’re at a very cool place right now,” Mr. Anderson said. “There’s not too much analysis of what we’re doing, and that’s part of the magic.” Bands like Sunn O))) — pronounced “sun” and named after a brand of amplifier — and Boris, a Japanese trio inspired by the Melvins and fronted by a skinny female guitarist named Wata, are redefining the genre’s frontiers by essentially ignoring them. How far they’ve pushed became obvious when Sunn O))) toured as the opening act for the more conventional Swiss black metal act Celtic Frost.

Mr. O’Malley, who is now based in New York, recalled the first show, at the Fillmore in San Francisco. “I looked out at their crowd and realized we do not have a metal crowd by any means compared to this,” he said. “Imagine if it was 10,000 years ago and you had your tribe and you thought you were a metal tribe, and then the real metal tribe came over. You’d lose your territory pretty fast.”

In truth, though, the performers all come from the same place as that audience: a profoundly obsessive fanhood. Mr. Anderson makes a joke about how he first hooked up with Mr. O’Malley when both lived in grunge-era Seattle and idolized a Sub-Pop act called Earth — whose founder, Dylan Carlson, is now signed to Southern Lord. “It was all about getting really stoned and getting as many amps together as we could,” he said. After forming bands with the more conventionally metallic names Goatsnake and Burning Witch, the pair came up with Sunn O))), and Mr. Anderson launched the Southern Lord label to put out their records.

The band’s live shows often act as endurance tests for the audience, with sound waves generated as much for tactile sensation as audible comprehension, and the ever-impending threat of the so-called brown note — an extreme subharmonic rumble reputed to challenge the intestinal fortitude of more sensitive fans. Meanwhile, fog machines whir and the musicians vanish beneath the hoods of their dark monk robes.

Last year, such ritual intensity won Mr. Anderson and Mr. O’Malley a cover story in the countercultural monthly “Arthur,” which more often champions freak-folk heroes such as Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom. “Blacker Sabbath” was the headline, and while the musicians enjoy some of the drama inherent in metal, they also are having a bit of a laugh. The name Southern Lord indulges some of Mr. Anderson’s affection for religious imagery, but he’s the first to acknowledge its actual source. “We were drinking a lot of Southern Comfort, and listening to a lot of Lynyrd Skynyrd,” he said. “We thought it was a cool-sounding name.”

The label is even more Dixie-fied than that. The Hidden Hand, a Maryland-based band that performs tonight at Club Midway in the East Village, is one of the standard-bearing acts on Southern Lord — although front-man Scott “Wino” Weinrich has an epic reputation as a member of such defunct bands as Saint Vitus and the Obsessed. While tracks on the new album, “The Resurrection of Whiskey Foote,” deploy that exaggerated bass drone that Black Sabbath minted on “Iron Man” and evoke the seismic dread of a leviathan trawling through sludge — with a high-hat marking time — much of the record flat-out boogies. The springy rhythms and choogling guitars of “Lightning Hill” are pure Southern rock, as is the wailing harmonica that keeps up the locomotive pace. And with its song cycle about a mythic “first American” — a renegade heir to African slaves and native tribes — the album reaches for consonance with a literary landscape mapped by Constance Rourke in her classic study “American Humor.”

Mr. Weinrich, much like his peers, doesn’t analyze things too much. He credits the lyrical themes to bassist Bruce Falkinburg. “You’ll find him reading ‘The Iliad,’” he said. But the performer does enjoy telling a good story. “We still like to sing,” he said, calling from an Arby’s drive-through lane somewhere in the heartland, where his band was on tour. “Singing isn’t popular anymore.” Instead, metal vocalists are still in love with the Cookie Monster, the slang phrase for the slow, guttural “Narrrrrghhh” sound that approximates speech on many death metal recordings. Like a blues singer, Mr. Weinrich would rather belt it out, enunciating his syllables with passion and verve.

Even if its signature acts spiral off into interstellar orbits, Southern Lord remains grounded in those essential qualities. “It’s really important to have a strong voice in the underground,” Mr. Weinrich said. “Greg’s tenacity is crucial, man.”

Even Jack Black can bow to that.

The NY Sun Files: Kidd Jordan

Even people who aren’t sure they’ve heard of Kidd Jordan have probably heard him. Now 73, the tenor saxophonist has been playing since the early 1950s. And since Mr. Jordan’s spirited adolescence coincided with the dawn of rock ‘n’ roll and the explosion of new sounds coming out of New Orleans’s fertile rhythm-and-blues scene, the Crescent City native was at the right place at the right time.

Click Image to Enlarge

Luciano Rossetti

ON THE HORN The saxophonist Kidd Jordan.

Mr. Jordan was barely out of his teens when he began gigging with the Hawkettes, a band featuring future New Orleans musical royalty Art and Aaron Neville, whose 1954 hit “Mardi Gras Mambo” became a parade anthem. In the half-century since, the avuncular multi-reedist has backed up everyone from Ray Charles to Martha and the Vandellas to Stevie Wonder, worked alongside Professor Longhair and Little Richard, and recorded with Elvis Costello and R.E.M. But for all his session and stage credits, Mr. Jordan has always pursued a parallel path as a jazz avant-gardist of the purest intent. It’s in that role that the saxophonist visits New York this week, headlining a Wednesday night tribute to his career at the 13th annual Vision Festival, the world’s leading free-jazz summit. This year’s edition will present more than 50 events, including music and dance performances, poetry readings, film and visual art projections, and panel discussions.

“It’s like a love-in,” Mr. Jordan said of the festival, where he has performed nearly every year since it was launched in 1996 by the dancer-choreographer Patricia Nicholson Parker and her husband, the bassist and bandleader William Parker. “All the cats that I love are playing. It’s a family thing. You just get up and assert yourself. You play and you do what you do.” Talking by phone from his daughter’s house in New Orleans, Mr. Jordan often displayed an amused regard for the world and for himself. “You know, other than in Chicago, New York, and Europe, people always look at me strange.”

Mr. Jordan is no stranger to the Vision Festival, where his fierce and lyrical style can erupt in whatever impromptu pattern he chooses, without puncturing decorum.

The weeklong lollapalooza first emerged as an alternative to the city’s big-ticket corporate jazz festivals of the mid-1990s, namely the mainstream JVC festival and the long-defunct Bell Atlantic and Verizon festivals organized by former Knitting Factory owner Michael Dorf. Though the Vision Festival has an amorphous relationship to genre — it has hosted artists as non-jazz as Cat Power, and has long fostered an appeal to indie-rock fans — it revels in old-school free improvisation and next-wave jazz exploration. There’s a particular focus on the long tail of influence extending from the revolutionary sounds of such 1960s icons as John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and Albert Ayler. It’s a continuum into which Mr. Jordan slips seamlessly, as he will demonstrate when he plays four sets in a variety of combos featuring such favored associates as Mr. Parker, the drummer Hamid Drake, and Chicago tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson, another unsung hero who was previously honored by the festival.

“We’re used to playing together,” Mr. Jordan said of Messrs. Parker and Drake, who are to this kind of music what, say, Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare were to reggae in the 1970s, and who have collaborated with the saxophonist in various settings during the past decade. Thanks to such a high degree of almost telepathic chemistry, the musicians can move together like a breeze gathering force, capable of radical and unexpected shifts. In the quartet with Mr. Anderson, the rhythm section may become the front line, musically speaking, while the saxophonists create a modulating background of rushing, roiling tones. “They’ll throw different things at you; that’s what I like about improvised music. You don’t get stuck in ruts. You can’t look for nothing!”

A fifth ensemble, formed around two of his musician sons — trumpeter Marlon and flautist Kent — as well as alto saxophonist Donald Harrison, will pay a New Orleans-themed tribute to Mr. Jordan.

It’s appropriate, given that the musician chose to stay in his hometown rather than join a generation of his peers who left for Los Angeles and studio work in the 1960s, or spent most of their time on tour. Instead, Mr. Jordan became an educator, teaching at Southern University in Baton Rouge, running summer music camps for kids, and raising seven children of his own, four of whom are now professional musicians.

“I figured if I always had a job teaching, I could play what I wanted to play,” he said. The only thing that pushed Mr. Jordan out of the city was Hurricane Katrina, which forced him to relocate to Baton Rouge until his home is finally repaired. (“Nobody’s getting nothing done,” he said. “But you got to put up with it. You can’t do nothing about it.”)

While Mr. Jordan became a valued resource in New Orleans, his work as a soulful improviser with a surplus of old-school R&B shout in his heart has filtered out to free-jazz fans through a network of independent labels in America and Europe. As a young man, Mr. Jordan said, he was another horn player copying Charlie Parker’s licks. Then one day, someone played him “Something Else!!!!” a new album by a then little-known musician named Ornette Coleman. “And I said, ‘This is it! I know I’m in the right direction now,’” he said. “Oh, man. When I heard that … Hallelujah!”

As far as lifetime recognition goes, though, Mr. Jordan has no worries. The characteristically self-effacing performer may appear modest, but beneath his New Orleans charm he’s just as tough and singular as Mr. Coleman — and as purely individualistic as any of his now-legendary bandmates from the 1950s and ’60s. As we spoke, he cracked a joke about the time someone was trying to track him down.

“I said, ‘Man! If you want to hear me play then come by my house. As long as I can practice, I don’t care if I play nowhere.’”

The NY Sun Files: Jonathan Kane

Originally published in the NY Sun, Aug. 26, 2008. Not revised, as yet.

As a drummer, Jonathan Kane has worked for such demanding bandleaders as the minimalist godfather LaMonte Young, and Michael Gira of post-punk brutalists Swans. But before all that, Mr. Kane was a teenage blues addict with a fake ID who toured up and down the East Coast with his harmonica-wielding older brother Anthony, in the Kane Brothers Blues Band. It was the 1970s.

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Sheri Hausey

KANE IS ABLE Jonathan Kane (on drums) and his band February.

The combo lasted only a few years, breaking up about the time Mr. Kane reached legal drinking age. One day, on one of his frequent pilgrimages to the heavily black South Side of Chicago, the white Mr. Kane found himself performing in Theresa’s Lounge, a club in which white patrons were best advised to sprint from the taxicab to the door. As he played a favorite beat, he heard a gruff voice call out.

“Where’d you learn how to do the whorehouse shuffle like that?”

It was Junior Wells, the legendary Chicago singer and harmonica player. Mr. Kane had never heard the rhythm called that before, but the comment was high praise. The “whorehouse shuffle” has since become a signature for Mr. Kane.

“It’s characterized by a little grace note just before the backbeat,” he said. “It makes the backbeat swing a little harder. Most bluesers know it as the ‘double shuffle.’”

It’s a major component in the music Mr. Kane performs with his band February, a five-piece rock outfit that headlines the Saturday finale of P.S.1’s Summer Warm-Up, a series of free outdoor concerts at the Long Island City art museum. The band, which will release its second album, “Ear Jet Party” (Radium), early next year, boasts three guitarists. The front line generates the same textured harmonic effects that Mr. Kane has loved so much about his 20-year collaboration with the composer Rhys Chatham, in whose armies of 100 or more guitarists the drummer served as the sole percussive source.

Mr. Kane’s propulsive verve imports the infectious, hip-shake rhythms of Chicago blues, while the guitars mass and drone behind a simple, slippery theme of a few choice notes. There’s a lot of moonshine in it, and a lot of old-school New York art-rock spirit. Only there’s no pretension — it’s party music.

“We played our own style of very high-octane Chicago-style blues,” Mr. Kane, speaking by phone recently, said as he recalled his days gigging with his brother. “Very, very aggressive super-charged blues. And I just never escaped it.”

Even the drummer’s tenure with the Swans, whose stark and abrasive aesthetic he helped create with Mr. Gira, came to an end when the band’s style began to shift.

“The whole rhythmic subdivision thing was fun,” he said. “But then the band lost a sense of swing and became more of a Teutonic grind. I liked it when it had a little bit of a lilt.”

Mr. Kane also suffered hearing damage in his right ear, for which he blames a faulty monitor at the Mudd Club, a downtown hot spot circa 1982.

Saturday’s concert harks back to those days, which were recently celebrated in a book, “No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York 1976-1980″ (Abrams Image), by Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and the rock critic Byron Coley. Sharing the bill is another figure who made his name in the early-1980s “no wave” era of New York rock, the saxophonist, soul shouter, and occasional pugilist James Chance.

“We’re both acts that have taken the black American musical experience — whether it’s blues, jazz, or funk — and pulled it into a direction of our own,” Mr. Kane said. “Both bands have credibility with people who don’t like that kind of music.”

Mr. Kane is sanguine on the topic of reunions, which have been popular with rock bands of early-’80s vintage.

“I mean, Mission of Burma sounds better than ever,” he said. “But I’m just trying to have a reunion with myself!” Several years ago, the musician took a full-time job as a photographic editor for Time Life. He also oversees the archives of his father, the photographer Art Kane, who is best known for his 1958 Esquire magazine photo of 57 jazz giants, “A Great Day in Harlem.” Art Kane, whose wide variety of work included portraits and album covers for the likes of Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, the Who, Janis Joplin, and Lester Young, gave his son an early introduction to the music world. But Mr. Kane found that it was difficult to sustain a financially sensible career from it.

“The [photography] job had the opposite effect, though,” he said. “Since I was less stressed financially, I became 10 times more productive.” An invitation to record a one-off vinyl single for the independent art-music label Table of the Elements, which had released a box set of Mr. Chatham’s older recordings, led to an ongoing series of albums and festival performances for February.

The band features young musicians from the Brooklyn bands Bear in Heaven and Clara Venus, as well as longtime friends and guests, such as the singer-songwriters Peg Simone and Lisa B. Burns. Ultimately, the group testifies to Mr. Kane’s almost glandular connection to a peculiar rhythmic concept: the whorehouse shuffle.

“I don’t know anybody in New York who can play a double shuffle who’s a straight blueser,” he said. “They can’t swing, unless they’re jazzers.”

But the jazzers just don’t have the thump.

“I need to play it with the power of a rock drummer and the freedom of an improviser,” Mr. Kane continued, paying heed to the imperative to keep some figurative grease on top of the beat. It’s allowed the drummer to come full circle, though he still laughs pretty hard about the glory days.

“What was fun was people’s reactions,” he said, remembering those assaultive performances with the Swans. “These dyed-in-the-wool, seen-it-all New York crowds were shocked. But I didn’t like people coming up and saying, ‘My stomach hurts.’ I like to see people dance. When we’re having a great time, people really seem to lose themselves, and when people seem to lose themselves, so do I.”