February 29, 2004

The Many Faces, and Grooves, of Arthur Russell

rthur Russell, a cellist and composer, was three years into his many-sided New York life the night he first went to a disco. He was a Buddhist, an Iowa corn-belt kid, a classical musician, an avant-gardist and a pop singer-songwriter with a soft tenor croon. He was also a gay man in his mid-20's. And at the Gallery (at Mercer and Houston Street — today an expensive corner of SoHo but back in 1977 a deserted industrial ghost town), all those disparate parts of his identity started to come together. He was in the right place at the right moment, and what he heard there changed his life.

He later told the writer David Toop, in the only print interview he ever gave, that he had been frustrated by the narrow-mindedness of the progressive new music scene. He had presented some new work at the Kitchen, but because the compositions involved a drum set, he said, the crowd dismissed them as "a sign of some new unsophistication." That night at the Gallery, Nicky Siano, the pioneering disco D.J., was working the turntables, and the drums and drones and chants, the connected grooves of great length must have seemed a sign of some new ultrasophistication from an inviting foreign place.

To the end of his short life — he died in 1992, of complications from AIDS, at the age of 40 — his endeavors could seem completely incoherent. Musicians from one of his worlds were unlikely to know much about the others. But a new stream of CD reissues, brought about by the current fascination with the early-80's dance and rock scenes, offers the chance to do what few but his closest friends have yet been able to: figure out who Russell was, all at once. They also offer a lesson in the limitations of genre — divisions like "rock," "pop," "soul" and "classical," which were imposed by the old model of the physical record store but which a digital sea of recorded music may rearrange to fit the way people actually respond to music.

In the early 70's, Russell spent a few years in San Francisco, living in a Buddhist commune. Moving to New York in 1973, he studied a bit uptown, at the Manhattan School of Music, and worked downtown as music director at the Kitchen, the performance space in Chelsea, where he collaborated with Christian Wolff and John Cage. He attracted the admiration of Philip Glass with "Instrumentals, Part Two," scores for large ensembles that were full of stirring melody, part Copland and part western movie soundtrack. He jammed with members of the Talking Heads at a loft in Long Island City. He played his cello at Buddhist ceremonies and behind Allen Ginsberg's poetry. (Ginsberg helped find him an apartment in the East 12th Street building where he lived.)

Through Ginsberg's influence, John Hammond, who helped bring Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen to Columbia Records, took notice and supervised a recording of Russell's band, the Flying Hearts, for Columbia. But Columbia finally didn't know what to do with Russell's poetic, ambling country-pop songs, and the album was never released. Perhaps the label didn't trust Rusell to be a pop star it could put before the public; he was shy and known to apologize onstage. Or perhaps Russell's own quiet contrariness got in the way: his friends remember that whenever anyone praised one of his songs, he'd start to dislike it.

With his first record — it was the disco single "Kiss Me Again," with Nicky Siano as a co-producer, and was released under the name Dinosaur — he took a left turn into popular culture, and into pleasure: from the realm of nubby arts grants and oblique program notes into that of 12-inch singles and amyl nitrate. The song's popping bass and congas and Myriam Valle's blissed-out singing — as well as funky rhythm guitar played by David Byrne and Russell's sawing cello — made it clear that he wasn't playing around. But he was an unorthodox convert, performing obsessive remixes on this and other singles, treating dance music as just a particularly good area of sonic experimentation rather than a permanent home.

It was a time when adventurous New York performers moved freely among disparate audiences: Mr. Glass played at rock venues like Max's Kansas City, Fab Five Freddy spun records for the crowd at the Kitchen. But art at the street level remained undisturbed by these events. You were either of it or you weren't. Russell was messing with the real thing, going into a different world and making legitimate dance music with the Ingram Brothers, a Philadelphia-based rhythm section that had become a first-call unit for R & B studio sessions.

"He was fascinated by other worlds," said the bassist Ernie Brooks, who played with him in the Flying Hearts. "When I was playing with him, he wanted to create a transcendent pop music. He loved Fleetwood Mac, he loved Abba. He thought there was something pop had that classical didn't have — something more real, more democratic. There was an element of provocation in this, but it was also part of his pursuit of something magical."

Still, he never became a regular clubgoer. He didn't dance. He was obsessed with rhythm tracks, and in a larger sense with sound. Tom Lee, his domestic partner during Russell's last decade, remembers that when he did venture out to a club, he went for a specific reason: "To hear the sound of the records."

Mr. Lee elaborated: "If he heard about a record, he would buy it, listen to its sound and hardly listen to it again. He wanted the freshest rhythm-track sound available. Going out to clubs was research. He would bring his test pressings in the afternoon to the Loft, to hear how it sounded in that space. Then we would return that night, hear it, and go home."

In disco, he found a good use for the drones he'd practiced while studying North Indian music at the Ali Akbar College of Music in San Francisco. (He'd gone there after running away from Iowa.) But he also found a release for the sweetness and the startling poetry that was within him. Many New York artists around that time were using aggression and anxiety in their work: Chris Burden and Vito Acconci's violent late-60's performance art, Mr. Byrne's yelpy self-interrogations with the Talking Heads, Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham's symphonic blastoffs for massed electric guitars. Russell's work had no aggression in it whatsoever, but patience and kindness instead; this is one of the reasons it doesn't now feel stuck in its time.

Through the 80's, "Kiss Me Again," as well as his "Is It All Over My Face" and "Go Bang," were often played at the Paradise Garage, a kind of connoisseur's disco that was the soulful downtown analog to the glitzier Studio 54. (Russell did, however, perform at Studio 54 at least once; the composer and writer Ned Sublette remembers seeing him there in 1980, singing over a backing track with his cello hanging from his neck like a guitar.) They were songs in which the ecstatic and experimental tendencies met and agreed, and they became some of the most admired records in New York's gloriously oddball dance music scene, winding their influence through the Talking Heads and by extension to a current generation of cool bands like the Rapture.

Today, those are the recordings for which Russell is remembered first; they are the ones that collectors seek out. But two albums' worth of reissues in the last three months, with more to follow, reveal not only a much broader musician, but also one who finally made sense of himself.

"The World of Arthur Russell," which appeared a few months ago from the British label Soul Jazz, is heavy on the early disco adventures. "Calling Out of Context," just released by Audika Records, collects later works, including the songs he was working on before his death, which he seemingly couldn't finish for fear of giving up the fight to live.

Through the years, as these two albums make clear, Russell's music contained more and more of him. He helped start a label, Sleeping Bag, in 1982; it gave him an outlet to make more creative and idiosyncratic dance records, using his cello's thunking lines and rhythmic scratches against the drums and bass.

They became more and more imaginative, and by the period represented on "Calling Out of Context," they weren't dance music records at all but minimal, beat-driven pop. One of Russell's paradoxes was that despite his attraction to strange sounds, he had a commercial ear, and his later music is dotted with truly sellable moments, FM radio playlist moments. (One can easily imagine "Wild Combination," from "Calling Out of Context"— a swift, ethereal bit of pop about being happily in love — sung by Bruce Springsteen.) But there weren't enough of those moments to make him a presence on the airwaves.

Russell's trajectory led him to an album — not his very last work but his deepest statement — called "World of Echo," released on Rough Trade in 1987. He'd perfected the music at performance spaces around town, including Experimental Intermedia on Centre Street, where, Mr. Lee remembers, there were sometimes as few as three people in the audience. The music was made with only Russell's voice and cello; as he played and sang, he manipulated a few effects boxes to saturate the music with echo, boost the low range, turn the bouncing of his bow on the strings into a kind of quiet drum. His lyrics sound harmless on the outside but are sometimes charged with sexual suggestion: "I'm hiding your present from you," "She thinks of us as friends." Russell intended to make another version of the same music, for full orchestra with no echo. At the time, he wrote in a notebook that he was interested in "liquefying a `raw material' where concert music and popular song can crisscross." Conceived during a period when he worked in isolation, "World of Echo" is one of the strangest, loveliest, most fully realized records I know, and sort of a Rorschach blot: you might associate it with Nick Drake, or you might say it was João Gilberto gone American and spaced-out. In some way, you might feel you'd heard it before. It will also be rereleased by Audika, in May.

Aside from a monthlong stint as a messenger, Russell never had a job outside music. He worked daily at a shared rehearsal space and stuck to a personal ritual: every full moon, whether he had new songs or not, he would get a haircut and go into the recording studio — sometimes only for an hour, if money was short. "He was really persistent in his quest," said his friend the composer and saxophonist Peter Gordon. "And his quest wasn't really to do a finished product but more to do with exploring his different ways of working musically, with songs, and in studios."

Ernie Brooks put it more succinctly: "He never arrived at a completed version of anything." His quest yielded more than a thousand tapes, mostly sketches but also two dozen completed songs and nearly 100 hours of live material, which are being gradually mined for later Audika releases.

His various distinctions — folkie, art-music songwriter and improviser, dance-club maven — seem incoherent until you hear several of his records. When musicians get angry about being categorized by critics, I usually feel frustrated: readers, after all, want to know what the record sounds like. With Russell, I take the musicians' angle. Just listen to it and you'll understand.