The number of pop artists that have chosen to go avant-garde is extremely small, but none went so far as Noel Scott Engel, a guy from Ohio better known as Scott Walker. The British daily “Guardian” aptly put it, he is “Andy Williams reinventing himself as Stockhausen.”
The Go-Betweens produced some of the most mutant, evocative intellectual pop, that never succeeded at the time it was made, but lingers on til this day.
Claudine Longet, a French singer/actress who got somewhat famous, but also infamous, in the US has been almost all but forgotten by the general public. But there’s a lot to her story, from her marriage to the '60s superstar Andy Williams, friendship with Bobby Kennedy, a prominent murder trial, and more.
Albert Ayler, never getting the wider recognition he truly deserved, unleashed a free-form musical exploration that went beyond the boundaries of jazz or any other music that included everything he experienced musically – from church spirituals, New Orleans and Army brass music, to world folk forms, to free improvisation – any and all of these themes, often all at the same time.