15 January 15–21, 2026 miaminewtimes.com | browardpalmbeach.com NEW TIMES | CONTENTS | LETTERS | NEWS | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | CAFE | MUSIC | 100 Recs Thurston Moore co-authors a survey of essential free jazz and improvisational records from 1960 to 1980. BY BOB WEINBERG T he concept was relatively straightfor- ward: Select 100 avant-garde jazz re- cordings and write about their cultural significance and artistic merit. But the task was hardly as simple as the directive for Sonic Youth founding guitarist Thurston Moore, saxophonist Mats Gustafsson, and music writer Byron Coley. The three friends, who Moore describes as “geeky record collectors,” co-authored Now Jazz Now: 100 Essential Free Jazz and Improvisation Recordings 1960-80, an entertaining and informative survey of some of the wildest music recorded during a 20- year period of intense creative ferment. “As hardcore collectors of free jazz and im- provisational recordings, we created this pa- rameter of 1960 to 1980,” says Moore during a Zoom conversation with New Times from his home in London; born in Coral Gables, he fre- quently spends winter and spring months in the City Beautiful. “When digital media starts coming in, we kinda used scissors there.” Intense debates ensued as the authors pared the list down to 100 titles. The giants of avant-garde are here — John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor — but so are more obscure artists from all over the world, many of whom recorded for indie, artist-run labels. Making the exercise even more challenging, the writ- ers decided not to include more than one leader date per artist. “There could have been any number of Cecil Taylor records, for God’s sake,” Moore says, brushing aside a cascade of blonde hair that tumbles over his eyes as he speaks into his iPhone. “So, which Cecil Taylor record did we choose? Those were real serious dis- cussions. Which one really captures the aes- thetics of what we’re talking about in a way that’s possibly like an entry point for a first- time listener?” Creating entry points was critical to Moore. When he moved to New York City in 1977, a few years before forming Sonic Youth, avant-garde jazz was not on his radar. He had developed a love for straight-ahead jazz and schooled himself on recordings by Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, and early Coltrane, art- ists who were pushing the boundaries of the music but hadn’t completely slipped the com- positional tether. His curiosity led him to two seminal texts — John Litweiler’s The Freedom Principle: Jazz After 1958 and Leroi Jones’ (Amiri Baraka’s) Black Music — that opened him to avant-garde jazz artists such as Sun Ra and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. “I had come across those records through some people in my life in the early ’80s,” he explains. “I had such a disconnect from [avant-garde jazz], because I couldn’t really process what was going on. So I didn’t just jump into free jazz. I went there through lis- tening to a lot of traditional jazz, which I re- ally loved, and read everything I could about it through the late ’80s and early ’90s. Then I started getting into more avant-garde jazz, and I got really immersed in that.” Moore frequented the Knitting Factory, a club around the corner from his apartment on 13th Street, where he witnessed perfor- mances by avant-garde heavies such as gui- tarist Sonny Sharrock, drummer Sunny Murray, and saxophonist Byard Lancaster. On his own Ecstatic Peace label, he recorded with drummer William Hooker and saxo- phonist Frank Lowe, major players on the avant-garde jazz scene. He continues to per- form with masters such as saxophonists Evan Parker and Joe McPhee. “I never really wanted to be looked at as a rock musician slumming it in the free impro- visation world, as if that was secondary,” he says. “And I always wanted to be very studious in my engagement with free improvisation. I got so attuned to this kind of hidden language that exists on the bandstand with players. And it allows me to bring a lot of ideas and con- cepts into composition, and vice versa.” Before his deep dive into experimental music, Moore was a rock-and-roll-loving teen growing up in Connecticut. His parents, who both attended the University of Miami, had met in Coral Gables, where Moore was born in 1958. After landing a post at Western Con- necticut State University in 1967, his dad relo- cated the family to the Constitution State, but they would return to visit relatives in the summer. “There was a record store in Miami Beach in the ’70s,” Moore recalls, “where I found the elusive Fun House LP by the Stooges which defined much of my musical future.” (These days, he might turn up at area vinyl peddlers such as Found Sounds, Tech- nique, Sweat and Lucky. “Miami,” he says, “is one of the better spots in the USA to find good second-hand records.”) He also remembers, in the ’80s and ’90s, playing gigs on the Beach with Sonic Youth at the Cameo Theater and Club Nu. A noise scene was developing here at the time, with champions including Tom Smith and Frank Falestra (a.k.a. “Rat Bastard”) and their bands Harry Pussy and To Live and Shave in L.A. “It was Tom who sent me VHS videotapes of early Harry Pussy gigs in and around Miami, which I had been allowed to broadcast on 120 Minutes on MTV back then,” Moore says. “He, Rat, and I had a mutual fascination with lo-fi, lo-brow, lo-down noise experimenta- tion and Dada avant-garde everything.” “In a lot of ways,” he continues, “Miami al- ways had the weirdest, wildest purveyors of this genre, particularly Rat himself, and of course, Harry Pussy, along with just about ev- ery strange-oid noisenik walking through the doors and onto the stage at Churchill’s, which Rat curated masterfully. Rat’s International Noise Conferences are legendary, and again, some of the most killer shows were Miami- based acts.” Among a lengthy roll call of those acts, he mentions Laundry Room Squelchers, Alex Diaz, The Curious Hair, Otto Von Shi- rach and Amanda Green, and also nods to presenters such as Steve Malagodi and Gus- tavo Matamoros. Jazz-wise, Moore cites saxophonist Kenny Millions, who owned Sushi Blues Cafe in Hollywood and presented South Florida con- certs with fellow avant-jazz greats from around the world, as an important figure. “I knew him when he performed under his original moniker of Keshavan Maslak in NYC in the ’80s,” he says. “He moved to Miami and drank the alligator juice and became the ab- surd disruptor that is Kenny Millions.” Miami continues to pull Moore into its subtropical orbit. He wouldn’t mind residing year-round in the Gables or South Miami with his wife, Eva Prinz, daughter Zazie (16), and son Jules (14). In the immediate future, look for a possible book signing for Now Jazz Now this spring at Books & Books. The project, like so many others in his life, was built on his pas- sion for music, one coveted LP at a time. “My interest in free jazz, in some ways, was predicated upon my interest in the com- munitarian aspects of punk-rock,” he says, citing the DIY ethos that pervades both genres. “So to discover, much later in my mu- sical life, that there were practitioners of jazz who were creating their own labels was really an epiphany. And it pre-dated what I thought punk-rock owned to such a degree. It was more punk-rock than punk-rock could ever be as far as making radical music.” [email protected] Before his deep dive into experimental music, Moore was a rock-and-roll- loving teen growing up in Connecticut. Thurston Moore photo | CROSSFADE | t Music
