The New York loft jazz movement of the 1970s was a pivotal period for uncompromising, artist-produced work. Faced with a flagging jazz economy, a group of young avant garde improvisers chose to eschew the commercial sphere and develop alternative venues in the abandoned factories and warehouses of lower Manhattan. The Loft Scene will provide the first book-length study of this period, tracing its history amid a series of overlapping discourses surrounding collectivism, urban renewal, experimentalist aesthetics, and the radical politics of self-determination.
