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Jazz is bubbling up from the underground up in Woodstock, New York:

The Creative Music Studio here remains under-documented and little understood. But a definitive history of jazz in the 1970s — a book yet to be written — ought to give it central importance.

During the dawning years of jazz education the studio, run out of various re-purposed settings — a barn, a Lutheran youth camp, a motel — was the un-music school, roughly analogous to Black Mountain College, the progressive school in North Carolina that brought together avant-garde writers, dancers and painters in the 1930s, '40s and '50s.

The constant musical activity at the studio, in workshops and concerts, yielded about 400 hours of tapes: startling performances by Don Cherry, Anthony Braxton, Cecil Taylor, Lee Konitz, Frederic Rzewski, Jimmy Giuffre, Roscoe Mitchell, Steve Lacy, Abdullah Ibrahim, Carla Bley, Ed Blackwell and many others.

This treasure trove of recordings is finally making its way into the light of day, and that's a very good thing:

When the tapes are fully digitized, Mr. Berger and Ms. Sertso - the husband and wife who founded the school - plan to give them back to the individual artists to use as they like. "It's their property," Mr. Berger said during an interview at his home in Woodstock on Monday. "It's what they brought here. We only created the environment for it."

Marilyn Crispell was one recipient of the teachings there:

"In the history of contemporary improvised music it was a very, very big thing," the pianist Marilyn Crispell said of the studio, where she studied and taught from 1977 to 1982. "It was a totally unique place in the world, totally non-bureaucratic — a hands-on experience, free and creative." Ms. Crispell made many contacts there who helped guide her through the next decades of her life, including Anthony Braxton, who met her there and brought her into his quartet for a decade.

Support The Creative Music Studio to bring these special recordings out from the dark!

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