Jody Harris is an American guitarist, singer, songwriter and composer who was born in Kansas^[1] and became a central figure in the seminal no wave scene in New York City in the 1970s.

Career history

Harris was lead guitarist in the Contortions, an influential No Wave band. He was also a key member of a number of bands that emerged from the no wave scene, including the Raybeats and the Golden Palominos.

Harris has also recorded as a solo artist and with guitarist Robert Quine. In 1977, he joined Quine in a band backing rock critic Lester Bangs on Bangs' 7" single, Let It Blurt, produced by John Cale.^[2] He was also briefly a member of the Voidoids and played on many recordings by a wide range of artists, including Matthew Sweet, Syd Straw, Kip Hanrahan and John Zorn.

With Quine, he composed all the music on their collaborative album, Escape, as well as co-writing virtually all the Raybeats' material. He also composed all the songs and instrumentals on his one solo album, except for one song co-written with Don Christensen. As part of Anton Fier's supergroup the Golden Palominos, he co-wrote the majority of the songs on the band's acclaimed second album, Visions of Excess.

Critical appraisals

One esteemed critic described Harris as a "seasoned campaigner from the late-1970s flowering of American postpunk",^[3] while another called him "one of the most underrated guitarists" on the New York scene.^[4]

Robert Palmer, writing in The New York Times in 1987, praised "the luminous clarity" of Harris's lead guitar work for the Golden Palominos,^[3] while the Village Voice's Robert Christgau obliquely criticized what he called a "weakness for the genre exercise".^[5] Quine himself, however, declared Harris's work "tragically underrated -- he's so far advanced, way past me and people can't hear it".^[6]

Discography

References

External links

• Jody Harris-penned tribute to Robert Quine in Perfect Sound Forever, May 2007
• Interview with Dusted webzine