The first great avant-garde masterpiece, according to Laurie Anderson
Laurie Anderson has a truly bizarre career, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s exactly the way she wanted it.
An artist in the truest sense of the word with intensive training in both music and sculpting, Anderson made her name as a performance artist in the avant-garde art world of 1970s New York. While she was a violin prodigy who was composing and releasing music, her peers were fellow art visionaries like Phillip Glass, Timothy Leary and John Cage.
Then the strangest thing happened. Laurie Anderson, she who had once frozen her feet into a block of ice and kept playing the violin until the ice had melted away, had a hit. One of Anderson’s song, an electro curio called ‘O Superman’ attracted the attention of One Ten Records owner B George, who asked if they could release it officially. Now, the release was very small. Only a thousand copies were pressed, with Anderson wrapping and distributing the single herself from her own apartment.
However, one of these singles found its way into the hands of British radio legend John Peel, who started playing it regularly on his massively popular BBC radio show. This turned it into a shock pop hit in the UK, then in the US. Anderson becoming a pop star didn’t for a moment dim her artistic vision, though. She may have signed a major label record deal, but she was still getting Warner Bros to release five-disc albums of her performance art masterworks.
So, which fellow artists were inspiring Anderson to make music like this? In an interview with Classic Album Sundays, Anderson talked through her favourite avant-garde records. Excitingly, most of the artists and albums she chose were from long after her heyday. The likes of Anohni & The Johnsons, William Basinski and Negativland paint a picture of an artist who never stops looking for artistic inspiration. The earliest of all of them, though, was from someone who’d been a formative influence on Anderson.
Who did Laurie Anderson credit with the first great avant-garde record?
Interestingly, this record didn’t come from the same underworld of art that Laurie Anderson came from, where everyone’s conceptual works were as aggressive as they were progressive. No—this was an instrumental record. One where the artistic edge came not from shocking presentation or noise experiments, but from taking a classic sound and experimenting with it. Adding more modern elements to bring a vintage form of music into the 20th century.
The record itself was by Astor Piazzolla, a man credited with doing to tango music what Duke Ellington did to jazz, The Beatles did to rock ‘n’ roll, and Bob Dylan did to folk music: taking a style of music with strict boundaries and limitations and removing them. Piazolla’s brand of Nuevo Tango was a sensation, considering what Piazolla was doing with his instrument of choice, the resolutely unfancied accordion relative to the bandoneon.
One of the many people listening closely to his work on the instrument was Laurie Anderson, who picked out his 1986 masterpiece Tango: Zero Hour as the first great avant-garde album released. She said of his instrumental work, “The way Astor Piazzolla uses pauses when he plays bandoneon is so dramatic, I’ve tried to learn from him how he phrases things. Tango: Zero Hour is full of this kind of drama.”
Which makes sense. After all, Laurie Anderson wasn’t just a musician first and foremost, but an instrumentalist. Her work on the violin was her way into creating art as a whole, so it checks out that one of her great inspirations would be one of the great instrumentalists of our time, who pushed a whole genre forward the way Anderson did throughout her career.
