Annette Peacock

Annette Peacock's work as a vocalist, pianist, and composer is austere, cryptic, laconic, minimalistic, and relentlessly individual. Her dry delivery and penchant for stark, stripped-down musical "environments" have made her something of a cult figure and an icon of the avant-garde. An early participant (1961-1962) in Dr. Timothy Leary's psychedelic culture experiments and a longtime adherent of Zen Macrobiotics, Peacock has been releasing albums since 1968. But her career has been marked by fairly long periods of silence; this partly explains her relative obscurity. Aside from a brief period of formal study at Juilliard during the 1970s, Peacock is entirely self-taught. Born in Brooklyn, she began composing by the time she was five. Her first professional association was with saxophonist Albert Ayler, with whom she toured Europe in the 1960s. She soon began to write in an idiom she calls the "free-form song," which emphasizes the use of space in contrast to the busy, cacophonous tendencies of free jazz. During this period she met and married her first husband, the double bass virtuoso Gary Peacock. She also began to write material specifically for the avant-garde pianist Paul Bley and his trio. For decades, Bley has remained one of her most devoted interpreters. Among her other accomplishments, Peacock is an unsung pioneer of electronic music. Years before the commercial emergence of synthesizers, she received a prototype from inventor Robert Moog. This prompted her to synthesize her own voice, which according to most reports had never been done before. Ultimately these experiments brought about an innovative 1971 album, The Bley/Peacock Synthesizer Show. Despite her decidedly unorthodox profile, Peacock has had several interesting points of contact with mainstream...