Loft scene

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As loft scene was a free jazz scene in New York called the 1960s and 1970s. The name comes from the cheap loft apartments where the scene was concentrated.

Origin and history

The loft scene emerged from the mid-1960s in the New York districts of SoHo , East Village and Lower East Side . As New York business moved out of the City to the suburbs to benefit from lower taxes and better traffic conditions, warehouses and businesses became empty and freelance artists gradually moved into them. Among them were representatives of the New York free jazz scene who were outside the jazz mainstream. The lofts were not only used for living, they also served as event locations and recording studios. An important forerunner of the loft scene is a series of concerts under the title The October Revolution in Jazz, which was organized by Bill Dixon in the fall of 1964 (although it took place in the Upper West Side , which was not part of the later loft milieu).

Representatives of the loft scene included Ornette Coleman , Sam Rivers , Rashied Ali , John Fisher , Joe Lee Wilson , Warren Smith , and William Parker . Collaborators from other cities included Anthony Braxton , Leroy Jenkins , Henry Threadgill , Oliver Lake , Julius Hemphill , Hamiet Bluiett , David Murray and Arthur Blythe .

After a high phase in the first half of the 1970s, the scene died out at the end of the decade due to economic problems of those involved and gentrification . In 1972 a festival took place in Sam Rivers' loft, which was presented as a counterpart to the Newport Jazz Festival , which took place at the same time and where the jazz mainstream was represented.

In May 1976, saxophonist Sam Rivers created the 5-part series Wildflowers: The New York Loft Jazz Sessions in Rivbea's studio .

The New York downtown scene is considered to be a certain ideal and stylistic continuation of the loft scene .

style

It is controversial whether the loft scene was characterized by its own style. The music created in the lofts was characterized by an explicit rejection of the mainstream; she referred to the free jazz of the 1960s. This base was often based on elements of funk , blues , African and Afro-Cuban music . The scene also had relationships with other avant-garde centers of US jazz at the time, such as the Chicago AACM or the St. Louis Black Artists Group .

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