Curlew

Featuring: Bill Laswell, Tom Cora

condition (record/cover): EX+ / VG+ (spine wear)

In late February 1980, George Cartwright, a Memphis-born saxophonist who had moved to New York, took a quintet up to the Creative Music Foundation studio in Woodstock and cut his band Curlew's first record across three days. The personnel: Tom Cora on cello, Bill Laswell on bass, Nicky Skopelitis on guitar, Bill Bacon on drums and gamelan. Two cuts came from a live date at CBGB's the same month, with the same line-up. The record was issued the next year by Atlanta-based Landslide.

This Curlew is not yet the Knitting Factory line-up that would emerge later in the decade with Davey Williams and Pippin Barnett. It is rougher, freer, more closely aligned with the Downtown loft-jazz scene of the Reagan turn. Cartwright's alto cuts across Laswell's funk-inflected bass on the opener; Cora's cello moves between bowed lines and prepared-string electronics that anticipate his work in Skeleton Crew; Skopelitis (he would shortly become Laswell's most frequent collaborator) flickers in and out of the textures with what sounds like real-time editing. Laswell himself, two years before Material's One Down, plays bass as a melodic instrument throughout.

The original vintage Landslide pressing on LD 1004. Curlew would record extensively for Cuneiform through the 1990s, but this first record, captured across three days in 1980, is the document of a band genuinely inventing what would later be called the Knitting Factory sound.