Arthur Russell

Russell's profile rose in the 21st century owing to a series of musical releases (including collections of previously unreleased material) and biographical works.

Charles Arthur Russell Jr. (May 21, 1951 – April 4, 1992) was an American cellist, composer, producer, singer, and musician from Iowa, whose work spanned a disparate range of styles.

After studying contemporary composition and Indian classical music in California, Russell relocated to New York City in the mid-1970s, where he became involved with both Lower Manhattan's avant-garde community and the city's burgeoning disco scene.

His eclectic music was often marked by adventurous production choices and his distinctive voice.

In 1973, Russell moved to New York and enrolled in a formal degree program at the Manhattan School of Music, cross-registering in electronic music and linguistics classes at Columbia University.

While studying at the conservatory, Russell repeatedly clashed with Pulitzer Prize-winning serialist composer and instructor Charles Wuorinen, who disparaged the composition "City Park" (a minimalist, non-narrative suite incorporating readings from the works of Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein) as "the most unattractive thing I've ever heard".

Embittered by his experience, Russell briefly considered transferring to Dartmouth College at the behest of experimental composer Christian Wolff, whom he had sought out and befriended upon arriving in the Northeast.

But after a chance meeting at a Wolff concert in Manhattan, he became close with Rhys Chatham, who arranged for Russell to succeed him as music director of The Kitchen, a downtown avant-garde performance space.

As a result, he abandoned his studies and remained in New York.

Russell worked as musical director of the New York avant-garde venue the Kitchen in 1974 and 1975, but later embraced dance music, producing or co-producing several underground club hits under names such as Dinosaur L, Loose Joints, and Indian Ocean between 1978 and 1988.

During his tenure at The Kitchen (from the autumn of 1974 to the summer of 1975), he greatly expanded the breadth and purview of the venue's offerings, crafting a program that "support[ed] other local and relatively low profile composers rather than... accentuat[ing] the work of composers who were beginning to acquire an international reputation."

This approach elicited controversy when Russell booked Boston-based proto-punk band The Modern Lovers for an engagement at the venue, widely regarded as a leading bastion of minimalism.

Russell's booking of Fluxus stalwart Henry Flynt's "punkabilly" ensemble Nova'billy, concluding his season as director, was likewise unsettling to the avant-garde establishment.

According to biographer Tim Lawrence, "the decision to program the Modern Lovers and Talking Heads was Russell’s way of demonstrating that minimalism could be found outside of compositional music, as well as his belief that pop music could be arty, energetic and fun at the same time."

Russell and Chatham later briefly roomed together in a sixth-story walkup apartment at 437 East 12th Street in the East Village; Ginsberg (who maintained his primary residence in the building from 1975 to 1996 and helped Russell secure the apartment) supplied electricity to the impoverished composers through an extension cord.

Russell resided in the apartment for the rest of his life.

From 1975 to 1979, Russell was a member of The Flying Hearts, recorded by John Hammond, which consisted of Russell (keyboards/vocals), ex-Modern Lovers member Ernie Brooks (bass/vocals), Larry Saltzman (guitar), and David Van Tieghem (drums, vocals); a later incarnation in the 1980s included Joyce Bowden (vocals) and Jesse Chamberlain (drums).

This ensemble was frequently augmented in live and studio performances by the likes of Chatham, David Byrne, Jon Gibson, Peter Gordon, Jerry Harrison, Garrett List (who succeeded Russell as musical director of The Kitchen), Andy Paley, Lenny Pickett and Peter Zummo.

During the same period, various permutations of this ensemble, together with Glenn Iamaro, Bill Ruyle and Jon Sholle, performed & recorded excerpts from Instrumentals, a 48-hour-long orchestral work that constituted Russell's first major work in the idiom.

In 1976, Russell was in talks to join Talking Heads, who were a trio at the time.

He recorded an acoustic version of the song "Psycho Killer" with the band, playing cello.

He would also collaborate on arrangements for early Talking Heads songs.

He stated that they became friends but he "ended up not joining the band. They were all from art school and were into looking severe and cool. I was never into that. I was from music school and I had long hair at the time."

Around 1976, Russell became a habitue of New York's nascent underground disco scene, namely Nicky Siano's Gallery on Houston Street in SoHo.

He co-founded the independent label Sleeping Bag Records with Will Socolov in 1981, and collaborated with a wide variety of artists, including musicians Peter Gordon, Peter Zummo, and Talking Heads, DJs such as Walter Gibbons, Nicky Siano, and Steve D'Aquisto; and poet Allen Ginsberg.

Their lone 1981 album on Sire Records (initially released as Big Sky before being tweaked and re-released as Event Horizon) featured few songwriting contributions from Russell, who abruptly left the band at the approach to the Holland Tunnel before an important concert in Washington, D.C.

The only full-length studio albums Russell issued under his name were the orchestral recording Tower of Meaning (1983) and vocal LP World of Echo (1986); he also released the disco LP 24→24 Music (1981) under his Dinosaur L alias.

Over the last two decades of his life, he amassed a large collection of unreleased and unfinished recordings, in part due to his perfectionist working tendencies.

Selections from the Instrumentals sessions were eventually collected on an eponymously titled album, released by Belgian label Disques du Crepuscule in 1984.

The collaboration among Russell (once again as a keyboardist), Brooks, and Chamberlain extended into The Necessaries, a power pop quartet fronted by guitarist Ed Tomney.

He died from AIDS-related illnesses in 1992, still in relative obscurity and poverty.

Several posthumous compilations of his music were released, including The World of Arthur Russell (2004) and Calling Out of Context (2004).

In a 2007 interview with Wax Poetics magazine, Siano downplayed the popular myth that Russell's interest in the genre solidified over the course of a single night, noting that "Louis [Aquilone, Siano's best friend and Russell's then-lover] was at the Gallery every single Saturday night. After spending a few Saturday nights without Louis, Arthur decided to come. After the third or fourth time there, he started to come without Louis".

Though an eager dancer, Siano has described Russell's style as "strange... outrageous, weird... he was definitely a 'white-boy' dancer."

The documentary Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell was released in 2008.

Russell was born and raised in Oskaloosa, Iowa; his father was a former naval officer who eventually served as mayor of the small city.

As a child and adolescent, he studied the cello and piano and began to compose his own music.

When he was 18 he moved to San Francisco, where he lived in a Buddhist commune led by Neville G. Pemchekov Warwick.

After earning his high school equivalency, he studied North Indian classical music at the Ali Akbar College of Music and Western composition part-time at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

He met Allen Ginsberg, with whom he began to work, accompanying him on the cello as a soloist or in groups while Ginsberg sang or read his poetry.