It ain’t Saturn’s rings, but you’ll find an interesting photo at the Interpretations series web page of a large portion of Manhattan’s Downtown music scene, all the people participating in next October’s “Sounds Like Now” festival who happened to be in or near New York at the time of the photo shoot. Click on the photo, and it will fill your screen. The composers and improvisers are:
Bottom row, left to right: Mary Jane Leach, Jin Hi Kim, David First, Phill Niblock
Second row: Roscoe Mitchell, Peter Zummo, Daniel Goode, Jon Gibson, Joan LaBarbara, Chris Mann
Third row: Tom Hamilton, Annea Lockwood, Tom Buckner, “Blue” Gene Tyranny, Nora Farrell, William Duckworth, Joshua Fried, Fast Forward
Back row: Mark Dresser, some joker who looks remotely like myself but has a fatter face, Bill Hellermann, David Behrman, Michael Schumacher, Muhal Richard Abrams
The photo shoot was at Phill Niblock’s loft, AKA Experimental Intermedia, a few months ago. Where they got the guy who’s a fatter version of me, and why I wasn’t in the photo myself (since I was there), I have no idea. It’s not exactly Downtown’s “Great Day in Harlem,” but as a representative portrait of Downtown music, give or take a few hundred worthy composers, it will have to do.