For a short time in the Seventies, the lofts and galleries in the downtown Manhattan neighborhood of SoHo were the center of an incredible burst of avant garde creative activity. The scene got its start when the iconoclastic jazz musician and composer Ornette Coleman moved into an abandoned factory on Prince Street, which he named Artist House. Soon, dozens of other musicians, painters, dancers, poets, and designers had gathered in SoHo to do work that would startle and inspire audiences and their fellow artists for years to come.
On September 23–24, Cornell hosted a unique reunion that brought many of the SoHo artists back together. Conceived by the painter Frederick Brown, whose daughter recently graduated from Cornell, the event comprised three panel discussions and an evening jam session (with President David Skorton on flute). The participants included the bassist Charlie Haden (above), a longtime Ornette Coleman collaborator, as well as musicians Sam Rivers, Henry Threadgill, Jerome Cooper, Malcolm Mooney, and James Jordan; visual artists Gregoire Muller and Anthony Ramos; photographer Anthony Barboza; dancer/choreographers Blondell Cummings and Megan Bowman Brown; poet Felipe Luciano; designer Jean Claude Samuel; and critic Stanley Crouch. The panel discussions, moderated by Cornell music professor Steve Pond and Brent Edwards of the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia, covered both the history of the SoHo scene—which, as Frederick Brown noted, is largely undocumented—and its lasting influence on the arts.
Local coverage included articles in the Ithaca Journal and Cornell Daily Sun, and the events were filmed. In addition, University Archivist Elaine Engst says that the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections hopes to gather materials that document the Soho scene; discussions with the artists are under way.