Square Dance

The guest list on Square Dance reads like a fantasy lineup assembled by someone with no respect for genre boundaries. Bill Laswell on bass. Sonny Sharrock on guitar — the free jazz guitarist who had recorded with Miles Davis and whose own later album Ask the Ages would become a landmark of spiritual jazz. Fred Frith on guitar, violin, and xylophone — the Henry Cow alumnus who had already reinvented what a guitar could do. Henry Threadgill on alto saxophone. George Lewis on trombone. All of them on a single track, four and a half minutes long, recorded at OAO Studio in Brooklyn in 1981 and released on Celluloid Records — the French label that was simultaneously putting out hip-hop, no wave, and avant-garde jazz, often on the same release.

Material formed in New York in 1979 around Laswell, keyboardist Michael Beinhorn, and drummer Fred Maher. From the beginning they operated as a collective rather than a band — a revolving door of contributors assembled around Laswell's bass and his instinct for what belonged together. Memory Serves, their second album, is the fullest expression of that approach: post-punk rhythms underneath jazz improvisation, the whole thing held together by a groove that refuses to resolve. Square Dance is the album's most kinetic track — a piece that earns its title by keeping everything in motion, every instrument responding to every other instrument, nothing settled or fixed.

Laswell went on to produce Herbie Hancock's "Rockit," Public Image Ltd's Album, Mick Jagger's first solo record, and work with Sly and Robbie, Afrika Bambaataa, and Fela Kuti — one of the more extraordinary production careers in music. Material continued in various configurations through 1999. But Memory Serves from 1981 is the record that captures the original idea most purely: a New York downtown scene in which the boundaries between jazz, punk, funk, and noise had not yet been drawn, and a group of musicians who had no interest in drawing them.