The artist Jean-Michel Basquiat frequently depicted music and musicians in his canvases. His subjects included the jazz legends whose records he often played as he painted: Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, and Basquiat’s personal hero Charlie Parker. Basquiat’s love of jazz and hip-hop and its influence on his practice have been explored in recent major exhibitions of his work, notably Seeing Loud (2023) and Writing the Future (2020-2021). Music was not only a source of inspiration for Basquiat—it was among his earliest creative endeavors. He emerged from a downtown New York City milieu in which nightclubs doubled as galleries and most artists were in rock bands. Basquiat was no exception. In 1979, he founded the experimental noise band Gray with drummer Michael Holman and guitarist Nicholas Taylor. The group performed a few shows at venues like the Mudd Club before disbanding in 1981. But Holman and Taylor have revived the group since Basquiat’s untimely death in 1988. Gray participated in two film portrayals of its late frontman: Julian Schnabel’s biopic Basquiat (1996) and Glenn O’Brien’s Downtown ’81 (2000). Gray finally released the debut album Shades of . . . in 2011, combining fragments of early recordings with new material. This presentation will examine Gray’s intermundane collaborations to understand Basquiat as an experimental musician.

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THEME is an interdisciplinary colloquium of faculty and student researchers in music theory (T), musicology/music history (H), ethnomusicology (E), and music education (ME). The Steve Larson Distinguished Lecture series, which honors the spirit of camaraderie and community evident in the career and life of UO music theorist, musicologist, and musician Steve Larson, is an academic lecture series coordinated by graduate students of the UO School of Music and Dance