Keith Haring The World Of Keith Haring

• B Beat Girls – For The Same Man
• Damon Harris – It's Music
• Pylon – Danger
• The Jonzun Crew – Pak Man (Look Out For The OVC)
• Funk Masters – Love Money
• John Sex – Bump and Grind It
• Sylvester – Over And Over (12" Disco Mix)
• The Girls – Jeffrey I Hear You
• Johnny Dynell and New York 88 – Jam Hot (Rhumba Rock)
• Talking Heads – I Zimbra (on CD version only)
• Art Zoyd – Sortie 134 (Part 2)
• Class Action – Weekend (Larry Levan Mix)
• Adiche – Chuka-Ja (Get Ready)
• The Girls – The Elephant Man
• The Golden Flamingo Orchestra – The Guardian Angel Is Watching Over Us
• Gray – Cut It Up High Priest
• Extra T’s – E.T. Boogie
• Convertion – Let's Do It
• Yoko Ono – Walking On Thin Ice
• Fab 5 Freddy – Change The Beat

• 1. B Beat Girls – For The Same Man
• 2. Damon Harris – It's Music
• 3. Pylon – Danger
  £0.99
• 4. The Jonzun Crew – Pak Man (Look Out For The OVC)
• 5. Funk Masters – Love Money
  £0.99
• 6. John Sex – Bump and Grind It
  £0.99
• 7. Sylvester – Over And Over (12" Disco Mix)
• 8. The Girls – Jeffrey I Hear You
  £0.99
• 9. Johnny Dynell and New York 88 – Jam Hot (Rhumba Rock)
  £0.99
• 10. Talking Heads – I Zimbra (on CD version only)
• 11. Art Zoyd – Sortie 134 (Part 2)
  £0.99
• 12. Class Action – Weekend (Larry Levan Mix)
• 13. Adiche – Chuka-Ja (Get Ready)
  £0.99
• 14. The Girls – The Elephant Man
  £0.99
• 15. The Golden Flamingo Orchestra – The Guardian Angel Is Watching Over Us
• 16. Gray – Cut It Up High Priest
  £0.99
• 17. Extra T’s – E.T. Boogie
  £0.99
• 18. Convertion – Let's Do It
• 19. Yoko Ono – Walking On Thin Ice
• 20. Fab 5 Freddy – Change The Beat

In collaboration with Tate Liverpool, Soul Jazz Records release this stunning new collection entitled The World of Keith Haring featuring music influential to the artist Keith Haring including Fab 5 Freddy, Yoko Ono, Gray (Jean-Michel Basquiat’s group), The Jonzun Crew, Larry Levan, Talking Heads, Sylvester, Johnny Dynell and many others.

The World of Keith Haring coincides with the presentation of the first major exhibition in the UK of Keith Haring’s work at Tate Liverpool on now.

The album comes in deluxe artwork and three formats: Double CD + 48-page book; 3xLP + download vinyl version. All formats of the album feature original photography, extensive sleevenotes and interviews.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Haring’s many friends and collaborators included Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Madonna, Fab 5 Freddy, William Burroughs, Jenny Holzer, Yoko Ono, Bill T Jones, Larry Levan, Timothy Leary, Futura 2000. If you were looking for a person to guide you through the wide variety of nightclub scenes of downtown New York in the 1980s, then Keith Haring would have been your man.

Keith Haring was diagnosed as HIV-positive in 1988 and died at the age of 31 on February 16, 1990. During his short time on the planet his work featured in over 100 solo and group exhibitions across the world and was seen on subways, in public spaces, on club flyers and consumer products.

Keith Haring was one of the key members of a group of New York-based artists who redefined the boundaries of modern art in the 1980s. Like his friends, including the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and graffiti artists Fab 5 Freddy, Lee Quiñones and LA II, Haring helped first bring the aesthetics of graffiti and street art to New York’s downtown; into both the fine art world, with his own shows at the Shafrazi Gallery and Patti Astor’s Fun Gallery, as well as into the alternative punk and new wave club scene, curating art shows at spaces like Club 57 and the infamous Mudd Club.

During this time the art and music worlds of downtown New York, especially that of the East Village, were colliding as the musical boundary lines between punk rock, dance music and hip-hop also blurred. Musicians were also artists, film-makers or actors. Artists formed bands and music was art. This was the world of Keith Haring’s New York; a collaborative world where the numerous artists he worked with were also friends, all inhabiting the same fertile, febrile and creative world of New York City in the 1980s.

Music played a central role in the creation of Haring’s art. In 1981 Keith Haring, Fab 5 Freddy and Futura 2000 organised ‘Beyond Words,’ the first downtown graffiti show on the top floor of the Mudd Clubb, with Afrika Bambaataa DJing at the opening, while downstairs the sounds of spiky punk/dance music played to a dancefloor populated with New York’s new punk and no wave glitterati – David Byrne, Deborah Harry, The Contortions et al – who mixed with poor East Village aspiring artists and Studio 54 celebrities like Andy Warhol, Grace Jones and David Bowie.

At his early solo art shows Haring hired break-dancers and DJs (including his partner Juan Dubose) to play at gallery openings. As hip-hop and electro exploded into the world, body-popping and electro boogie-ing characters also populated Haring’s paintings with much of the kinetic energy of his work part inspired by the dancefloor and street moves of B-Boys and B-Girls.

But the decisive moment in creating Haring’s musical tastes and inspiration came with a chance discovering of the Paradise Garage one night in 1984 while walking through the streets of the West Village with his friend Fab 5 Freddy. As Haring told biographer John Gruen:

‘I have never been the same since I walked into Paradise Garage … The music was phenomenal – Larry Levan was the DJ there and he was like a god in the DJ booth. I was totally mesmerized.’

Haring fell in love with the Paradise Garage, creating large scale artworks and flyers for the club, flying home from his exhibitions around the world to religiously attend Saturday nights there. Haring became friends with Larry Levan and in 1984 he put on his own Party of Life at the Garage with DJs Levan and Juan Dubose, and live appearances from his friends John Sex and the then-unknown singer Madonna.

By the second half of the 1980s Haring was spending more and more time away from New York and working in Europe. Despite this he remained connected to New York’s dance culture at all times through a constant stream of cassette mixtapes that he would listen to while working. These mixtapes were supplied by friends and lovers such as Jean Dubose and Gil Vazquez and playlists from the likes of Larry Levan, Frankie Knuckles and Junior Vasquez.

About the music:

The music collected on The World of Keith Haring is a combination of rare disco, early electro and New York punk/dance tracks reflecting the vibrant and hybrid world of downtown New York in the 1980s.

Here you will find early electro from The Jonzun Crew, Adiche and The Extra T’s alongside angular jerky crossover punk/dance and disco/not disco tracks like Pylon’s ‘Danger,’ John Sex’s ‘Bump and Grind’, Yoko Ono’s ‘Walking on Thin Ice’ and Mudd Club DJ Johnny Dynell’s ‘Jam Hot.’

The music of some of Haring’s favourite visual artists (and friends) also feature heavily including Jean-Michel Basquiat’s experimental group Gray, George Condo’s art rock group The Girls (produced by David Thomas of Pere Ubu) and early rap from Fab Five Freddy.

Paradise Garage soul and disco classics here include Sylvester’s seminal ‘Over and Over’; London DJ Tony Williams’ fusion of Jamaican dub and New York dance music as The Funk Masters, Damon Harris’s uplifting ‘It’s Music’ and disco producers extraordinaire Peter Brown and Patrick Adams’ homage to the new phenomenon of the day – The Guardian Angels of the New York subway system.

Together these are some of the tracks first heard in New York’s prolific underground club scene of the 1980s – including Club 57, The Mudd Club, Danceteria, Hurrah, Area, The Fun Club, Tier 3, The Palladium, Roxy, Pyramid and Paradise Garage. Haring was a regular face at many of these clubs, often a creative participant, both shaping and defining the cultural identity of downtown New York.

Also included is a track by the long-standing French experimental group Art Zoyd. ‘Sortie 134’ made as part of the music for ‘Le Mariage du Ciel et de L’Enfer’ (‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’), a ballet created by Roland Petit, choreographer at the National Ballet of Marseille, based upon a collection of pose and poetry by William Blake. As one of many works that Haring took on in Europe at the time, Petit commissioned the artist to create a massive 100-square metre backdrop painting for this show.

The selection of music on this collection is itself like a mixtape that reflects Haring’s wide-ranging musical influences and connections. And for someone who neither DJ’d nor played in a band he had impeccable musical tastes, with music playing a pivotal part in both his life and work, and functioning as an essential and always present soundtrack to both.

Exhibition details:

Keith Haring exhibition at Tate Liverpool 14th June 2019 - 10th November 2019

In 2020 the show then travels to:

Centre for Fine Arts (BOZAR), Brussels, Belgium: 5th December 2019 - 20th April 2020

Folkwang, Essen, Germany: 22nd May 2020 - 20th September 2020

Formats: Tr 10 CD/D only, Tr 8,14 on deluxe 3xLP/CD/D only

Reviews:

"★★★★★ Soul Jazz compilations make an excellent argument for the physical album purchase in the age of Spotify: substantial liner notes, great photos, collections put together to tell a story. The label has outdone itself with this one, released to coincide with Tate Liverpool’s retrospective of Eighties New York’s foremost creator of blocky, stylised pop art." The TIMES