This story begins, as many good ones do, with a gay man from Oskaloosa playing cello in a closet in a Buddhist seminary. It ends with a gentle and brilliant musician dying in New York long before his time. In between, the cellist, Arthur Russell, wrote orchestral music, produced disco hits, and recorded a body of solo cello-and-voice songs that fit somewhere between lullabies and art songs. The structural sprawl and harmonic flux common to what has come to be called “intelligent dance music” (a phrase Russell would have hated) and the songs of rock bands like Wilco and Radiohead characterized his music from the start.
An English label called Soul Jazz has just released “The World of Arthur Russell,” a collection of Russell’s dance-music productions; and a New York label, Audika Records, has issued “Calling Out of Context,” a collection of unreleased songs. Russell’s work is stranded between lands real and imagined: the street and the cornfield; the soft bohemian New York and the hard Studio 54 New York; the cheery bold strokes of pop and the liberating possibilities of abstract art. Arthur Russell didn’t dissolve these borders so much as wander past them, humming his own song.
Before his death, from aids, in 1992, at the age of forty, Russell collaborated and studied with so many lights of the avant-garde world that his résumé reads like an eagerly overdrawn backstory note for a movie character—“Right, right, I move to New York and I meet all the big artists! Robert Wilson, Philip Glass, Vin Diesel! Downtown is crazy!” As a teen, Russell, already a trained cello player and pianist, left Iowa and joined a Buddhist commune in San Francisco. Somewhere between living in the commune (where he had to hide his earthly cello playing) and two music conservatories, Russell met and worked with the poet Allen Ginsberg.
Russell arrived in downtown New York in 1973, at the age of twenty-two. He moved into an apartment building on East Twelfth Street. Ginsberg donated electricity through an extension cord. The punk musician Richard Hell lived in the same building, and the composer Rhys Chatham shared a room with Russell for a time.
“Arthur kept up with pop music, but he didn’t care about fashion,” his longtime partner, Tom Lee, recalls. “He wore T-shirts and jeans. He cut his hair on full moons, which is when he liked to go into the studio. He was self-conscious about his acne scars.”
“After he went to New York and when he came home, he was always completely immersed in his music,” his mother, Emily Russell, says. “He kept pieces of paper and score sheets in his shirt pockets—he always liked shirts with two pockets—and no matter where he was he would stop what he was doing and jot down notes or words.”
Russell found the downtown disco the Gallery and met the d.j. Nicky Siano. The music instantly made sense to Russell. Disco’s repetition and layering were, after all, not so different from Buddhist chants or Philip Glass’s looped ostinatos. Russell entered New York’s Sun Dragon studio in November of 1977 with Siano and a group of professional musicians, including David Byrne, on guitar. A year later, the song “Kiss Me Again” was released, under the band name Dinosaur, on Sire Records, the company’s first dance twelve-inch single. It is the most conservative of Russell’s dance recordings but possibly his best. After asking, “Am I woman? Or a slave?,” the singer Myriam Valle spends much of the song repeating, “Oh baby, oh baby, here we are again,” as the music decides not to be wherever here is. In the course of more than twelve minutes, phrases emerge and wrap around each other: Peter Zummo’s gorgeous trombone motif, Russell’s pizzicato cello theme, and a growing drone of loud, dissonant guitars which falls out of time with drums as it ends the song. When the smoke clears, genre is just a memory.
“The World of Arthur Russell” does not include “Kiss Me Again,” but it does include the song that established Russell in the dance scene. “Is It All Over My Face” was produced with a club d.j. named Steve D’Acquisto and released in 1980. The imposing Ingram Brothers, veteran players of dance-music sessions, were hired as the rhythm section, but the singers were three unknown dancers D’Acquisto and Russell had met at David Mancuso’s private club the Loft, then on Prince Street. One of the singers, Melvina Woods, repeats, “Is it all over my face? You’ve caught me love dancing,” which is fairly unimposing, as chants go. The music vamps around two root notes, rolling along and picking up hitchhikers: a small piano phrase, a bit of vocalese, a conga part. It’s a step down from the catharsis of “Kiss Me Again,” but the sweet and playful mood is of a piece with Russell’s body of work. Russell’s idea of Nirvana had little to do with gravitas or asceticism. Charm and restraint gild his careful repetitions and variations.
Russell’s recording sessions were a departure from the average hit-making process: they were closer in principle to jazz than to pop or dance. Musicians received brief instructions, rehearsed equally briefly, and then played for as long as felt right. Tapes from these sessions were then edited and recombined to make multiple records, a practice common to Jamaican pop forms like dub reggae. Russell often mixed songs more than ten times, highlighting different instruments each time, seeing infinity in an inch of tape. Patient business partners and label owners paid for these sessions, hoping for pop products to sell, not avant-garde experiments. It is to Russell’s credit that they are somehow both.
Soon after collaborating with Robert Wilson on a performance of “Medea,” in 1981, Russell started his own dance-music label, Sleeping Bag, with the downtown entrepreneur Will Socolov. One of Russell’s first singles on the label was “Go Bang,” a joyous tune full of yelping and cascading piano sounds. His dance singles were sounding more and more like birthday parties, possibly for people turning six.
Keith Haring and his electric children spring to mind. Russell and Haring were both gay men who came to New York and got swept up in various artistic communities. Liberated and empowered by disco, they both produced unapologetically bright, positive art that didn’t shun popularity. aids destroyed the foundations of downtown culture and ended their careers abruptly. The gray scrim of irony that settled over the nineties shortly afterward would not have been a nurturing environment for their art, either. Russell and Haring both saw that dance music was the avant-garde’s silent partner. History and hip-hop have proved them right.
While Russell was releasing dance singles, he was also recording songs written for solo cello and voice. The songs follow a fairly consistent pattern. Russell establishes the rhythm with a short phrase on his cello, playing pizzicato softly. In a checked voice that is almost humming, he sings a simple lyric. (“I’m sad and I can’t talk about it / All alone and right next to you.”) Sometimes there is an audible beat, though often not. Even when the songs were recorded in professional studios, the results sound like home recordings, intimate and foggy with breath. It is easy to imagine Russell returning from a club, alive with ideas, and trying to record a song without waking up Tom Lee. A fairly dark set of these songs was released in 1986 under the title “World of Echo.” (Audika will reissue an expanded version of this album in early summer.) A set of slightly more optimistic songs was compiled posthumously, in 1994, as “Another Thought,” for Philip Glass’s Point Music label.
Russell’s solo songs have a less conventional instrumentation than his disco records but, true to his contrarian tendencies, they are generally catchier and shorter, sometimes flirting with traditional verse-chorus movement. Two of the best of these songs, “Let’s Go Swimming” and “Schoolbell / Treehouse,” are on “The World of Arthur Russell.” On “World of Echo,” “Let’s Go Swimming” is a whispered confession, more like a poem with accompaniment than like any kind of pop music. In the dance version included on “The World of Arthur Russell,” Russell is the sly older brother, persuading us to jump into the ocean of drum machines with him: “I am banging on your door / hop in the blue blue sky.”
“Calling Out of Context” is taken from two unreleased albums recorded in the mid- to late eighties. This time, Russell’s voice and cello are shored up with drum machines and contributions from Zummo and the percussionist Mustafa Ahmed. His song titles have been trying to tell us a story—“Schoolbell / Treehouse,” “Let’s Go Swimming.” The songs on “Calling Out of Context” simply make the story more explicit. Russell’s inner child has the run of the joint now. What the critic Robert Palmer identified in 1977 as Russell’s “infinitely repeatable polyphonic kernels” have finally popped and are rattling around in the stereo field.
The songs are slight, and often sound as if they were written and recorded in the time it takes to play them. Some of the songs make an impression that lasts as long as cotton candy, which likely wouldn’t have bothered Russell. Others, like “Get Around to It,” could easily have been hits with a less idiosyncratic singer. Even when he shades into fey, Russell never sounds weak or self-pitying. “Calling All Kids” contains the relevant bit of philosophy. The music pumps and clatters like some gray-market imitation of hip-hop, frazzled and happy. The final sound is a supermarket ray-gun toy buzzing away as Russell says, “Grown-ups are crazy.” The sleek disco highs and sere art-world credibility are gone. Arthur just wants to play. ♦