theguardian.com, Wednesday 15 January 2014 16.40 GMT
n 1980, Roland Young, a classically trained jazz clarinettist, was living in an apartment in Manhattan's Kips Bay and making music in the studio he'd built in his bedroom, "so I could eat, take a shower, take a nap, wake up and go right into the studio, you know?" He adds: "Then go out and party all night."
Young is now 71 and living in Tel Aviv, but those years in New York have just been refreshed for him. Three decades on, the criminally overlooked music he made in that bedroom has been released as a record called Hearsay I-Land, and it's a fine reissue.
"There was a lot of cross-pollination of sounds happening," he says, recalling a decade filled with some of the greatest electronic music the city has ever played host to. "And that's what I'd really been about anyway, mixing various sounds together and coming up with another kind of sound in itself."
Before moving to New York in 1980, Young lived in San Francisco, where he hosted a show on the FM radio station KSAN on which he'd try out these new sounds. On his website, he describes this endeavour in typically expansive terms: "Africa, Asia, Europe and native America became the source material, space and silence became the structure, and composing, improvising and the continued development of instrumental facility became the tasks."
Young's passions ran to the charmingly arcane. He nurtured a particular interest, for example, in the correlation between the tonalities of pygmy singing and those of 1960s and 70s avant garde jazz. But Young was also a club kid, an enthusiastic dancer who took his own records along on nights out to try to persuade DJs to play them. He wouldn't likely see a division between these two sensibilities – the tirelessly experimental on the one hand, and the beat-happy, groove-seeking on the other – but when he brought the entirety of 1984's I-Land record to parts of 1987's Hearsay Evidence, it seems like the world wasn't quite ready for it.
"People didn't quite know what to think," he says, "because it wasn't new wave, it wasn't disco, it wasn't ska. And it had a sparseness about it that I don't think they'd quite heard at that time."
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/jan/15/roland-young-jazz-albums-reissue
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