John Lurie

In 1978 John formed The Lounge Lizards with his brother Evan Lurie; they were the only constant members in the band through numerous lineup changes.

Robert Palmer of The New York Times described the band as "staking out new territory west of Mingus, east of Bernard Herrman." While originally a somewhat satirical "fake jazz" combo spawned by the noisy No Wave music scene, the Lounge Lizards gradually became a showcase for Lurie's increasingly sophisticated compositions. The band's personnel included guitarists Arto Lindsay, Oren Bloedow, David Tronzo, and Marc Ribot; drummers Grant Calvin Weston, Dougie Bowne, and Billy Martin; bassists Erik Sanko and Tony Garnier; trumpeter Steven Bernstein; and saxophonists Roy Nathanson and Michael Blake. The band made music for 20 years.

In 1999 Lurie released the album The Legendary Marvin Pontiac: Greatest Hits, a posthumous collection of the work of an African-Jewish musician named Marvin Pontiac, a fictional character Lurie created. It includes a biographical profile describing the troubled genius's hard life, and the cover shows a photograph purported to be one of the few ever taken of him.[5] Lurie wrote the music and performed with John Medeski, Billy Martin, G. Calvin Weston, Marc Ribot, and Tony Scherr. The album received praise from David Bowie, Angelique Kidjo, Iggy Pop, Leonard Cohen and others.

"For a long time, I was threatening to do a vocal record. But the idea of me putting out a record where I sang seemed ostentatious or pretentious. Like the music of Telly Savalas . . . I don't sing very well, I was shy about it. As a character, it made it easier."[5]

In 2017, after 17 years, John Lurie released his first music album, Marvin Pontiac The Asylum Tapes.[6]

Lurie in 1992

Parallel to the final version of the Lounge Lizards in the early 1990s, Lurie formed a smaller group, the John Lurie National Orchestra, with Lurie on alto and soprano saxes, Grant Calvin Weston on drums, and Billy Martin on congas, timbales, kalimba, and other small percussion. Unlike the tightly-arranged music of the Lounge Lizards, the Orchestra's music was heavily improvised and compositions were credited to all three musicians.

They released an album (Men With Sticks, Crammed Discs 1993) and recorded music for the Fishing With John TV series. In February 2014 the Orchestra released The Invention of Animals, a collection of out-of-print studio tracks and unreleased live recordings from the '90s. Columnist Mel Minter wrote:

This new release may require a reassessment of Lurie the saxophonist because the playing is engagingly fluid, inventive, and visceral—and well worth revisiting. . . . The emotional immediacy of Lurie's playing – and that of his partners – makes for riveting stuff. Think of his sax not so much as a musical instrument, but instead, as a window with a clear view of his soul.[7][8]

Jeff Jackson of Jazziz added, "The resulting music is delicate, primal and utterly gorgeous."[9]

In August 2010, Tad Friend wrote a piece in The New Yorker about Lurie disappearing from New York to avoid a man named John Perry, who Friend said was stalking Lurie.[21] In the online literary magazine The Rumpus, Rick Moody noted that Friend's profile in The New Yorker, nominally about Lurie and his art, was two-thirds to three-quarters about Perry, including a full page photo of Perry standing in front of one of his own paintings. Moody confirmed that Lurie was very ill with "chronic Lyme disease" and described Perry as a deceitful stalker capable of violence.[19]

In May 2011 Perry undertook a public hunger strike to protest The New Yorker characterizing him as a stalker. Commenting about the protest, Lurie said, "He's conducting a hunger strike a half block from my house to prove he's not a stalker."[22] Lurie described the article as "wildly inaccurate," noting that its publication did not resolve anything and that "the situation continues."[10]

Editor David Remnick said the piece in his magazine was "thoroughly reported and fact-checked".[22] But in a letter to The New Yorker in August 2012, several interviewees claimed their words had been "twisted, misquoted, or ignored," and that "the man presented in the article [Lurie] is not the man that we know."[23] In a February 2014 interview, Lurie told the Los Angeles Times, "What one would hope is that the beauty in the music and in the paintings can somehow transcend and invalidate the kind of sickness that led to the article being written as it was and the kind of irresponsibility that allowed it to be published."[24]

• John Lurie National Orchestra, The Invention of Animals, 2014[25]
• John Lurie National Orchestra: Men with Sticks (Crammed Discs/Made to Measure, 1993)
• The Legendary Marvin Pontiac: Greatest Hits (Strange and Beautiful Music, 1999)
• Marvin Pontiac: The Asylum Tapes (Strange and Beautiful Music, 2017)[26]

• Lounge Lizards (Editions EG/Polydor, 1981)
• Live from the Drunken Boat (Europe, 1983)
• Live: 1979–1981 (ROIR, 1985)
• Big Heart: Live in Tokyo (Island, 1986)
• No Pain for Cakes (Island, 1986)
• Voice of Chunk (VeraBra, 1988)
• Live in Berlin, Volume One (VeraBra, 1992)
• Live in Berlin, Volume Two (VeraBra, 1993)
• Queen of All Ears (Strange and Beautiful Music, 1998)

• Stranger Than Paradise and The Resurrection of Albert Ayler (Crammed Discs/Made to Measure, 1986)
• Down by Law and Variety (Crammed Discs/Made to Measure, 1987)
• Mystery Train (Milan/RCA, 1989)
• The Days with Jacques (Sony Records, 1994)
• Get Shorty (Verve, 1995)
• Excess Baggage (Prophecy, 1997)
• Fishing with John (recorded in 1991; Strange and Beautiful Music, 1998)
• African Swim and Manny & Lo (Strange and Beautiful Music, 1999)