{"id":2201112,"date":"2025-12-16T11:06:20","date_gmt":"2025-12-16T11:06:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2201112"},"modified":"2025-12-16T11:06:20","modified_gmt":"2025-12-16T11:06:20","slug":"thurston-moore-documents-his-obsession-with-free-jazz-in-a-new-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/thurston-moore-documents-his-obsession-with-free-jazz-in-a-new-book\/","title":{"rendered":"Thurston Moore documents his obsession with free jazz in a new book"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Thurston Moore is obsessed with jazz.<\/p>\n

Not the mellow, easy-listening variety that serves as background music in elevators and waiting rooms.<\/p>\n

No, Moore goes for the hard stuff: wailing saxophones, arrhythmic bass lines, drums that follow beats so out of time they might as well come from the deepest reaches of space. Call it broadcasts from Planet Jazz.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re talking free jazz, an experiment in improvisational music that captivated the world\u2019s greatest jazz musicians in the second half of the 20th century: Albert Ayler, Derek Bailey, Ornette Coleman \u2014 and so forth.<\/p>\n

For the last six years, Moore has been pouring this passion into a new book: \u201cNow Jazz Now: 100 Essential Free Jazz and Improvisation Recordings 1960-80,\u201d co-written by Byron Coley and Mats Gustafsson and published by Ecstatic Peace Library, the publishing imprint he runs with Eva Moore. The book also features words from Neneh Cherry and Joe McPhee.<\/p>\n

The irony is abundant. The former singer, songwriter and guitarist of Sonic Youth, an experimental rock band with one foot in New York\u2019s no wave moment and another in the indie rock explosion of the early 1990s, is devoted to a subgenre of music that isn\u2019t exactly known for loud electric guitars.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also a departure from the autobiographical writing in Moore\u2019s memoir \u201cSonic Life\u201d published in 2023, or the work he does as a writing instructor at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colo.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, the book covers what he and his co-authors consider the 100 greatest records by artists both legendary and obscure. \u201cNow Jazz Now\u201d is more than a collection of greatest hits, it\u2019s the chronicling of a decades-long obsession with free jazz between \u201cthree record geeks who are really into collecting,\u201d Moore said via Zoom from his home in London last month.<\/p>\n

In a sense, the book began back in the \u201980s when Coley, Gustafsson and Moore started collecting these strange recorded documents in experimental sound at a time when these records were hard to find and even harder to research.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe knew that it was obscure,\u201d Moore said. \u201cWe weren\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Moore describes those days, he sounds like someone traveling back in time to a distant land: \u201cBefore the internet, before Discogs, before eBay, before anything. It was all very mythical,\u201d Moore said.<\/p>\n

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\u201cWe knew that it was obscure,\u201d Moore said of his obsession with free jazz that drove the writing of this \u201cNow Jazz Now.\u201d \u201cWe weren\u2019t interested in it for the sake of obscurity. We were very interested in it for the sake of the music and the personalities involved.\u201d<\/p>\n

(Vera Marmelo)<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n

As a young musician, Moore was interested in jazz but couldn\u2019t really make sense of it, so he turned to his friend Byron Cole for help. Cole had worked at Rhino Records in California and when he returned to the East Coast he was named the jazz editor of \u201880s hardcore zine Forced Exposure. Moore believed this was a radical statement in its own right considering the scene wasn\u2019t exactly known for nuance and sophistication.<\/p>\n

\u201cI asked him to make me a cassette for tour so I could try to decode what was going on here,\u201d Moore recalled. \u201cHe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

The musician who once spent hours poring over hardcore zines to track down the latest 7-inch records from bands popping up around the country like outbreaks in an epidemic now turned his mania toward jazz.<\/p>\n

\u201cI started collecting the records on tour,\u201d Moore said. \u201cI was going into every record store. looking for Sun Ra records. At the time, they were a dime a dozen. \u2026 Even in the early \u201990s, in certain college town record stores, they were like a buck each.\u201d Today, some of those original pressings go for thousands of dollars.<\/p>\n

Rounding out the trio is Gustafsson, a bona fide jazz musician, a wizard with a saxophone with deep feeling and unbridled enthusiasm. Here he is describing a collaboration between Eric Dolphy and Ron Carter: \u201cIt is free. It is beautiful. It is funny even! It freaks me out! Give me my brain back!\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cWe each have a distinct writing style,\u201d Moore acknowledged, but \u201cwe also wanted to make sure that our data was correct. So we\u2019re 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

The audience for these records were passionate but small, so by necessity the recordings were often do-it-yourself affairs. \u201cIt reminded me a lot of what interested me about punk rock early on,\u201d Moore said, \u201cthat it was music made outside of the permissions of the corporate record world. \u2026 That, to me, was really interesting. It was an artist-run scene.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s the music itself, which was beyond avant-garde. Cutting edge was the starting point. When Moore talks about these artists and their music, it\u2019s like he\u2019s describing a religious experience: \u201cIt\u2019s like a sonic boom from the first groove,\u201d Moore said of Peter Br\u00f6tzmann\u2019s \u201cMachine Gun.\u201d It\u2019s just this saxophone blaring through what sounds like a distorted snare head. It\u2019s so radical. It\u2019s a great piece of noise music, but it\u2019s free jazz, and it\u2019s not even following the structures of what you know to be proper jazz behavior. It\u2019s something else entirely.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\""Now <\/picture>\n
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\u201cNow Jazz Now\u201d<\/p>\n

(Ecstatic Peace Library)<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n

Or, as Coley quips, \u201c\u2018Machine Gun\u2019 is often the first record I play for punk listeners looking to open their holes a bit.\u201d <\/p>\n

The authors are so passionate about the project that the hardest part wasn\u2019t writing the book but deciding what to leave out.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had about 500 more records that we had to parse off the list,\u201d Moore admitted. \u201cWe 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\u2019ll probably put up on a dedicated site online. \u2018If you like these 100 records, and once you\u2019ve processed them, here\u2019s 500 more that you should really, really listen to!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Naturally, some of the ideas Moore was listening to on these records and seeing in clubs on the Lower East Side began to shape his own understanding of improvised music. \u201cWhen 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Does this mean that Moore has traded in his axe for a sax?<\/p>\n

Hardly. Moore is still writing songs, making records, and playing shows. Last year he released a new solo album \u2014 \u201cFlow Critical Lucidity\u201d \u2014 and dropped a new single just last summer. He will be performing at Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tenn., on March 28, 2026.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m a songwriter. I like writing songs. I like writing experimental pop songs,\u201d Moore said. \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ruland is the author of \u201cCorporate Rock Sucks: The Rise and Fall of SST Records.\u201d His new novel, \u201cMightier than the Sword,\u201d will be published next year by Rare Bird.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.latimes.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thurston Moore is obsessed with jazz. Not the mellow, easy-listening variety that serves as background music in elevators and waiting rooms. No, Moore goes for the hard stuff: wailing saxophones, arrhythmic bass lines, drums that follow beats so out of time they might as well come from the deepest reaches of space. Call it broadcasts […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2201113,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25179],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2201112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Thurston-Moore-documents-his-obsession-with-free-jazz-in-a.com2F922F922Fafb6600c45799fc457b019e1.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2201112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2201112"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2201112\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2201114,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2201112\/revisions\/2201114"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2201113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2201112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2201112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2201112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}