It remains the bravest and boldest music magazine of all time. From
1969 to 1973, Source: Music of the Avant Garde did what no other
publication has done before or since: publish radical scores and
recordings in a sumptuous, deluxe package that dared to flout, expand,
and piss on preeminent notions of music, notation, and
performance.
Source championed cult pioneers like Harry Partch and
John Cage along with a cross section of younger, unknown
innovators whose names we now know (Steve Reich, Pauline Oliveros, Jon
Hassell) and others who remain unjustly obscure (anyone else love Jani
Christou?). Computer music, sound poetry, improvised music, and
experimental electronics all found a home in Source.
Music magazines have included scores and recordings for
decades—Henry Cowell‘s New Music Quarterly began
bundling 78 rpm records in the early 1930s—yet Source broadened the notion of a score by embracing text-based instructions,
plastic transparencies, photos, and the truly far-out, such as glued-in
pieces of fur that you rub and stroke to perform Nelson Howe‘s
“Fur Music.”
Original issues of Source cost hundreds of dollars, and the
accompanying records are usually thrashed, so I’m excited by Source
Records 1-6 Music of the Avant Garde, 1968–1971 (Pogus). This
essential 3-disk set anthologizes the original 10-inch vinyl
Source records, which featured avant-garde classics such
as The Wolfman, David Behrman’s live electronics masterpiece
Wave Train, and the original recording of I am sitting in a
room by Alvin Lucier.
Forty years later, “music like none other on earth” remains a
spot-on description for another reissued landmark: In C (Sony
Classical) by Terry Riley. Consisting of 53 short musical
fragments, In C immerses steady, almost hypnotic pulses into a
Technicolor jungle of melodic cells. Within a basic beat, musicians
play each fragment as many times as desired and stop when everyone
reaches the 53rd fragment. Seattle composer Stuart McLeod once
described it to me as “the hippy drum circle piece of Western classical
music.” Remastered in glittering sound, this welcome reissue
atones for Columbia’s crappy 1990 budget CD release.
I’m also thrilled by the deluxe “Legacy Edition” of Tito
Puente‘s Dance Mania (RCA). A virtuoso percussionist and a
masterly arranger, Puente made truly smart dance music; he understood
how dramatic shifts in timbre—heard throughout Dance Mania as blasts of brass and interlocking percussion—can leave room for
catchy melodies that disguise sly dissonances, weird modulations, and
exotic scales heard in tunes like “3-D Mambo” and “Hong Kong
Mambo.”
Although a half-century old, Dance Mania remains a sonic
treasure, a model of engineering clarity and balance. A mother lode
of bonus tracks plumps up both disks, including the buoyant,
bop-flavored “Yambique” and “El Bajo,” the latter of which spotlights a
phenomenal bass solo by Robert Rodriguez. 
