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B. George | |
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| Born | Robert John George [1] 1949or1950(age 74–75) [1] |
Bob George, known professionally as B. George, is the co-founder and executive director of the ARChive of Contemporary Music in New York City. He also published the first comprehensive discographical reference work on punk rock and new wave music and founded the company One Ten Records.
After coming to Ann Arbor in the late 1960s, George attended the University of Michigan College of Art and Design.
George went to New York City in 1974 as a visual arts student at the Whitney Museum Studio Program. From 1975 to 1979, he co-directed performance artist Laurie Anderson's stage show. [2]
In 1977, he formed One Ten Records and released the first commercial compilation of audio work by visual artists—a two record set entitled Airwaves, that included the initial recordings of Laurie Anderson and unreleased work by Meredith Monk. In 1980, he received a National Endowment for the Arts grant to produce recordings by visual artists, and in 1981 released Laurie Anderson’s first single "O Superman". [3] This single went to number two on the UK charts and reached the top 20 in 16 countries. It was eventually released by WEA and has sold close to a million copies worldwide.
George cofounded the ARChive of Contemporary Music in New York City, which, with over two million sound recordings, the ARC is the largest popular music collection in the United States. The initial donation of 47,000 discs that began ARC's collection came from George himself, who accumulated them in the interval between moving to New York and publishing the International Discography, noted below.
In 1981, George published the first comprehensive discographical reference work on punk and new wave music, titled Volume, the International Discography of the New Wave . By its second edition in 1982, the book had grown to over 700 pages and was co-published and distributed internationally by Omnibus Press. Volume continues to be the definitive reference guide to this material, cited in The Readers Catalog, England's Dreaming, and many other publications.
As a consultant, Mr. George selected soundworks for the Paris Biennale in 1981 and 1983, and for New Music America in 1984. From 1982 to 1985, he produced an occasional survey of new American pop and experimental music for the BBC that was broadcast as part of The John Peel Show in the UK. From the mid-to late 1990s, he helped program Arts & Events at NYC's World Financial Center.
George also co-produced singles by Orchestra Jazira (Ghana/UK) and Sonny Okuson (Nigeria). He has written about music for The Village Voice, Playboy, Creem, ELLE, Spin and Billboard . Mr. George was the music editor for Benetton’s Colors Magazine and has done occasional writing about "music & food" for Saveur Magazine . He contributed to the planning of and provided research material for Goodtime Kings by Billy Bergman (Planet Rock/Quarto Books, 1985), the first American book on contemporary African Pop. He has consulted on many film projects including Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ and Goodfellas , Tom Hanks' That Thing You Do , and Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild, Beloved and The Manchurian Candidate . From 1993-1999 Mr. George sat on the Blue Ribbon Awards Committee for ARSC (Association for Recorded Sound Collections) choosing the best music books published, and in '99-00 was a member of the Yahoo Academy, voting on the Internet Life Awards for outstanding websites.
In early 2009 the ARChive partnered with Columbia University to create innovative academic initiatives and online content to help with the study, understanding and enjoyment of popular music from around the world.
No wave was an avant-garde music genre and visual art scene which emerged in the late 1970s in Downtown New York City. The term was a pun based on the rejection of commercial new wave music. Reacting against punk rock's recycling of rock and roll clichés, no wave musicians instead experimented with noise, dissonance, and atonality, as well as non-rock genres like free jazz, funk, and disco. The scene often reflected an abrasive, confrontational, and nihilistic world view.
Lewis Allan Reed was an American musician and songwriter. He was the guitarist, singer, and principal songwriter for the rock band The Velvet Underground and had a solo career that spanned five decades. Although not commercially successful during its existence, the Velvet Underground came to be regarded as one of the most influential bands in the history of underground and alternative rock music. Reed's distinctive deadpan voice, poetic and transgressive lyrics, and experimental guitar playing were trademarks throughout his long career.
Laura Phillips "Laurie" Anderson is an American avant-garde artist, musician and filmmaker whose work spans performance art, pop music, and multimedia projects. Initially trained in violin and sculpting, Anderson pursued a variety of performance art projects in New York during the 1970s, focusing particularly on language, technology, and visual imagery. She achieved unexpected commercial success when her song "O Superman" reached number two on the UK singles chart in 1981.
Elliott Sharp is an American contemporary classical composer, multi-instrumentalist, performer, author, and visual artist.
Discography is the study and cataloging of published sound recordings, often by specified artists or within identified music genres. The exact information included varies depending on the type and scope of the discography, but a discography entry for a specific recording will often list such details as the names of the artists involved, the time and place of the recording, the title of the piece performed, release dates, chart positions, and sales figures.
Arthur Edward Pepper Jr. was an American jazz musician, most known as an alto saxophonist. He occasionally performed and recorded on tenor saxophone, clarinet and bass clarinet. Active primarily in West Coast jazz, Pepper first came to prominence in Stan Kenton's big band. He was known for his emotionally charged performances and several stylistic shifts throughout his career, and was described by critic Scott Yanow as having "attained his goal of becoming the world's greatest altoist" at the time of his death in 1982.
The Kitchen is a non-profit, multi-disciplinary avant-garde performance and experimental art institution located at 512 West 19th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. As the organization undergoes a multi-year renovation it is currently sited at a satellite loft space in the West Village located at 163B Bank Street, where exhibitions and performances are regularly held. It was founded in Greenwich Village in 1971 by Steina and Woody Vasulka, who were frustrated at the lack of an outlet for video art. The space takes its name from the original location, the kitchen of the Mercer Arts Center which was the only available place for the artists to screen their video pieces. Although first intended as a location for the exhibition of video art, The Kitchen soon expanded its mission to include other forms of art and performance, and incorporated as a not-for-profit arts organization in 1973. In 1974, The Kitchen relocated to a building at the corner of Wooster and Broome Streets in SoHo. In 1987 it moved to its current location.
Francis John Tovey, known also by his stage name Fad Gadget, was a British avant-garde electronic musician and vocalist. He was a proponent of both new wave and early industrial music, fusing pop-structured songs with mechanised experimentation.
Hugh Alan Cornwell is an English musician, singer-songwriter and writer, best known for being the lead vocalist and lead guitarist for the punk rock and new wave band the Stranglers from 1974 to 1990. Since leaving the Stranglers, Cornwell has recorded a further ten solo studio albums and continues to record and perform live.
Stephen William Mallinder is an English artist and musician who was a founding member of Cabaret Voltaire, and went on to work as Sassi & Loco, the Ku-Ling Bros., Hey, Rube!, Wrangler, and Creep Show.
Punk visual art is artwork associated with the punk subculture and the No wave movement. It is prevalent in punk rock album covers, flyers for punk concerts and punk zines, but has also been prolific in other mediums, such as the visual arts, the performing arts, literature and cinema. Punk manifested itself "differently but consistently" in different cultural spheres. Punk also led to the birth of several movements: new wave, no wave, dark wave, industrial, hardcore, queercore, etc., which are sometimes showcased in art galleries and exhibition spaces. The punk aesthetic was a dominant strand from 1982 to 1986 in the many art galleries of the East Village of Manhattan.
Scott Crary is an American film director, producer and writer, best known for having directed, produced, filmed and edited the film Kill Your Idols, a documentary examining three decades of New York art punk bands.
Jimmy DeSana was an American artist, and a key figure in the East Village punk art and New Wave scene of the 1970s and 1980s. DeSana's photography has been described as "anti-art" in its approach to capturing images of the human body, in a manner ranging from "savagely explicit to purely symbolic". DeSana was close collaborators with photographer Laurie Simmons and writer William S. Burroughs, who wrote the introduction to DeSana's self-published collection of photographs Submission. His work includes the album cover for the Talking Heads album More Songs about Buildings and Food as well as John Giorno’s LP, You’re The Guy I Want To Share My Money With.
Marc Urselli is an Italian-Swiss freelance New York City & London-based audio engineer, music producer, mixing engineer, live sound engineer, remixer, sound designer, composer, musician, contributor, and blogger.
The ARChive of Contemporary Music (ARC) is a non-profit music library and archive based in New York City. It contains over five million items.
ZE Records was a New York–based record label, started in 1978 by Michael Zilkha and Michel Esteban, and closed in 1984.
Robert Sherman was an American radio broadcaster, author, music critic, and educator. He achieved success as a host of such radio programs as the folk music show Woody's Children, which started on WQXR and was later broadcast by WFUV, and classical music shows The Listening Room and Young Artists Showcase, which were broadcast by WQXR in New York City. As an author, he was a music critic and columnist for The New York Times for more than forty years as well as a writer of numerous books, including two bestsellers he co-authored with pianist and comedian Victor Borge. In May 2023, Sherman retired from radio. A month later, he died at age 90.
James Allan Curtis, known professionally as Diego Cortez, was an American filmmaker and art curator closely associated with the no wave period in New York City. Cortez was the co-founder of the Mudd Club, and he curated the influential post-punk art show New York/New Wave, which brought the then aspiring artist Jean-Michel Basquiat to fame.
Helen Louise Thorington was an American radio artist, composer, performer, net artist and writer. She was also the founder of New Radio and Performing Arts (1981), a nonprofit organization based in New York City; the founder and executive producer of New American Radio (1987–1998); and the founder and co-director of Turbulence.org (1996–2016).
Zoltron is an American rock music poster designer, street artist, and creative director. His posters are included in the collections of Victoria Albert Museum, London, de Young fine arts museum, San Francisco, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Boston Museum of Fine Art, the US Library of Congress, and The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum.
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