Great LP but I'd actually file it among the then-burgeoning New Haven creative music scene.
Maybe so, but was Michael Gregory not on the Wildflowers comp, perhaps there was some cross-polinisation going on?
In the spirit of the OP's enquiry maybe you could elaborate?
Well, New Haven and NYC aren't too far from one another... a number of New Haven cats played at the New York Musicians' Festival, so sure there was regional cross-pollination. And Gregory is an especially interesting character because he got into the Black Rock thing in the '80s with a group called Signal, which played in NY (and elsewhere). But Clarity is a very New Haven LP, even if it's not CMIF-related. (CMIF = New Haven musicians collective, Creative Musicians' Improvisers Forum)
That's interesting. How does the approach differ between New Haven music, and music one might have encountered in a NYC loft. I have a few Michael Gregory/Oliver Lake albums, and also a very lovely - almost folk/jazz Lp, with a lot of singing. A very interesting musician indeed. Who I believe has started playing publically again recently. He was a bit of a mystery man from this far away actually. And a very talented guitarist/improvisor.
Okay, the caveat being that the NYC lofts and the New Haven scene had a variety of musical approaches going on within them and that I am a bit young to have experienced it in the flesh, Leo Smith was an ex-AACMer living in New Haven and brought his particular sonic approach to a crew of young, like-minded New Haven musicians. The splintering of the AACM between Chicago and New York in the 70s certainly affected the lofts greatly so that leaderless ensembles developed with a more spacious approach to improvisation that I'd say was a far cry from the energy music of the '60s (though there were obviously holdouts). Egalitarian roles, little instruments and self-reliant spaces and musicians' organizations seemed to flourish more in New York at that time, and I think it is in great part due to the influx of Chicagoans. The New Haven scene was removed a bit from NYC and with Smith a kind of guru for those guys, a more studied granularity emerged in those musicians' work. Keep in mind that later Braxton collaborators like Gerry Hemingway and Ray Anderson were part of the New Haven scene, and Braxton paid frequent visits to town. This New Haven music is something I'm very interested in and researching as time allows.