VARIOUS ARTISTS

Kris Needs’ frighteningly-ambitious project aims to capture the fast-vanishing magic of New York City, documenting major musical landmarks and developments, decade by decade over a series of double-CD sets. The first volume focuses on the 1940s and 50s, setting the scene for a further five sets, straddling the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and 2000s, each accompanied by a book containing the relevant musical and social history, artist biographies, illustrations and Needs own stories and recollections of the city that once never slept. For some local perspective and occasional advice on inclusions, Needs is pestering names he has encountered during his 35 years as a writer, starting with Suicide’s Martin Rev. For the covers, he is applying the graffiti techniques he picked up in New York in the early 80s. The first volume includes jazz giants such as Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, Cozy Cole, Horace Silver, Miles Davis and Thelonius Monk, Mambo king Machito, the burgeoning activism-fired folk and blues movements represented by Pete Seeger and the Almanac Singers, Harry Belafonte, Josh White, Dave Van Ronk, New Lost City Ramblers, Allen Ginsberg heading up the Beats, John Cage and Raymond Scott the avant garde and Cab Calloway the Harlem street-slicker, before Big Joe Turner ushers in the rock ‘n‘ roll revolution along with Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters and the Honeycones. Singing the blues are Danny ‘Run Joe’ Taylor, Sonny Terry and Big Maybelle. The female singers which the city became renowned for are beautifully represented by Nina Simone, Faye Adams and Billie Holiday, while the mighty cavalcade of vocal groups who, for many, define New York City, include the Paragons, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, Five Satins and Embers. Explains Needs, who recently compiled and annotated two volumes of the highly-successful Dirty Water; The Birth Of Punk Attitude, ‘There hasn’t really been a project which brings together all the different ingredients in New York City’s musical melting pot as they happened in parallel scenes and neighbourhoods since the war. The sets will aim to reflect the different forms of music which gestated in local scenes, often before exploding onto the world stage; jazz, folk, mambo, rock ‘n’ roll, soul, avant garde, psychedelia, electronic, punk, hiphop, disco, electro, house and post-punk. ‘One of the aims of the series is to document and celebrate this lost city before it totally disappears, give it some unity and due respect, while striving to explain why the New York of the last half of the 20th century was the most exciting place on Earth. The buildings and individuals might be disappearing, but that indefinable spirit which affected so many has thankfully been captured for posterity on countless records, standing like snapshots of a bygone age, the tip of a mighty iceberg which will be gathered on these albums like an old photo album.’