The Lounge Lizards

Ablaze from the very first piano notes, limping hurriedly out of the wood. This is how the self-titled, vitalistic and decadent debut of the Lounge Lizards kicks off, catapulting us from the sidewalks of the late-Seventies East Village straight into Eric Mitchell's film "Underground USA" (1980), where "Incident On South Street" blares at top volume inside the interiors of Steve Mass's historic Mudd Club, the avant-garde venue/cabaret/stage of the New York scene and the set for the cinematic epitaph of no wave cinema. The deafening music ushers us into a bare living room where Patti Astor, a cult figure of the Downtown scene suspended between no wave and graffiti art, and Rene Ricard, actor and Andy Warhol protégé, pop open champagne in a re-enactment of Billy Wilder's "Sunset Boulevard" (1950). The no wave aesthetic is all there: to exist in the present, you have to reactivate the past by embodying it, retracing genres and stylistic tropes - including those of pop culture - only to break them apart and detonate them through a performative act.

It's the band's leader, John Lurie, who acts as a driving spark of no wave, within a body of artistic work spanning music, film and video, whose foundation is deeply intermedial, intertextual and collaborative. Actor/director with Mitchell on "Men In Orbit" (1979) and actor/musician for Jim Jarmusch from his debut "Permanent Vacation" (1979-80) to the unforgettable performances in "Stranger Than Paradise" (1984) and "Down By Law" (1986), Lurie is fascinated by the places where folklore, genres and genealogies of American music intersect - an interest that also led him to create the myth of Marvin Pontiac, his blues alter ego, whose life and works he invented on "The Legendary Marvin Pontiac: Greatest Hits" (Strange and Beautiful, 1999). Today Lurie stands as a living testimony of that scorching New York season, alongside figures like Lydia Lunch and James Chance, all brought back together in Celine Danhier's documentary "Blank City" (2010). Joining him on the Lounge Lizards' debut (on saxophone) are Arto Lindsay of Dna (guitar), Steve Piccolo (bass), Anton Fier of the Feelies (drums) and his brother Evan Lurie (keyboards).

It's impossible to overlook this artistic and cultural context, because the Lounge Lizards are a piece of a much larger puzzle, one that embodies, amplifies and expands the meaning and values of the Downtown New York culture from the mid-70s through the 80s: the idea of living in the here and now and creating works of art together through performance, shrinking as much as possible the gap between wanting to pick up an instrument or a camera and actually doing it, expressing a personal language and essentially doing away with writing altogether. Given their position in the teeming, explosive Lower East Side, their trajectory intersects with that of the nearby loft jazz scene, fueled by free/avant-jazz musicians like Anthony Braxton and Lester Bowie of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, as well as with the spirit of Moondog. It's no coincidence, in fact, that Marc Ribot would go on to join the Lounge Lizards, while Fier and Lindsay would collaborate with John Zorn, and Piccolo would make the excellent "Domestic Exile" (Materiali Sonori, 1982) with Evan's help.

While the strain of no wave most reactive to the punk/post-punk/new wave of those years was immortalized and canonized by Brian Eno through his production of the compilation "No New York" (Antilles, 1978), it fell to Teo Macero - the storied Columbia producer behind Charles Mingus, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Thelonious Monk, Dave Brubeck and the electric Miles Davis of "In A Silent Way" (1969), "Bitches Brew" (1970) and "A Tribute To Jack Johnson" (1970) - to tame and shape the Lounge Lizards' music. Macero is a particularly intriguing piece of the puzzle, not only because he links the band to avant-garde swing and bebop genealogies, but because he was perfectly attuned to the ensemble's deeply (audio)visual character, having himself composed film scores for one of the mothers of the American underground, director Shirley Clarke - an innovator and experimenter in what Michel Chion would call "audiovisions" - for whom he wrote the soundtracks to the short film "Bridges-go-round" (1958) and the medium-length "Skyscraper" (1959).

The opening track itself, "Incident On South Street", with its oblique, obsessive piano phrasing, is a manifesto of the New York ensemble's neo-Dada restlessness, built on the expression and dismantling of popular jazz forms through a level of musicianship that set them apart from other no wave bands. The languid swing of Earle Hagen's "Harlem Nocturne" (1939) marks the band's first homage to a jazz standard, its (sentimental) mood echoed and then upended on "Ballad", while "Do the Wrong Thing" is perhaps the track that most closely ties the Lounge Lizards to the postmodern context of the time, caught between post-punk rhythmic spasms, prickly sax phrasing and dissonant convulsions of guitar and organ.

"Au Contraire Arto" is where the idea of the jazz standard meets learned avant-garde experimentation in search of a synesthetic language in which music can mean something other than itself, resulting in a grotesque Dada-Futurist outcome sketched out by Lurie's sax and Lindsay's guitar, leading us into one of the album's two personalized tributes to Thelonious Monk: "Well, You Needn't" (1947) and, just before the close, "Epistrophy" (1941) - the latter particularly deconstructed and reimagined in the record's most warped section.

While "Wangling" closes side A with the band's rawest, most carnal sound, caught between furious bebop and punk tears that foreshadow jazz-core, "Conquest Of Rar" opens side B by sketching a cinematic jazz swing in whose folds the Naked City seem to lurk. Along this hallucinated, relentless line, amid stops and restarts, breaks and dissonant unisons, we find "Demented", "I Remember Coney Island" and "Fatty Walks", tracks that define the Lounge Lizards' jazz upheavals in an increasingly personal - and increasingly less no wave - way, with a strong presence of Evan's organ. Closing things out is the restless, minimal "You Haunt Me", an enigmatic tale of desirous persecution and possession, somewhere between surrealism and trance.

Completing the artistic construction of "The Lounge Lizards" is the artwork: Fran Pelzman's black-and-white photo captures the five of them in unbuttoned big-band uniforms in what could be a backstage area, wearing the classic cool (and slightly bored) expression typical of no wave figures, while the design is by Peter Saville (Joy Division, New Order).

In the year the album came out, the Lounge Lizards also played in Italy - at Bologna's ELECTRA 1 - Festival per i fantasmi del futuro, curated by Oderso Rubini, alongside Bauhaus, Dna, Brian Eno, Peter Gordon, Chrome, Gaznevada and the theatre group Magazzini Criminali, in that same Bologna which also played host to the Settimana Internazionale della Performance - and they had a significant impact on the Italian underground scene of the time, one example being Confusional Quartet. While it was on that occasion that Lindsay produced the first EP by the Bologna band Hi-Fi Bros, it would above all be Piccolo who carried this cross-pollination forward on the ground, eventually settling permanently in Milan from the 90s onward.

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07/02/2021