California Outside Music Association

The California Outside Music Association (a.k.a. COMA) was a nonprofit music presenter and networking organization operating in the Los Angeles area from 1983 until 1991. The organization is best known for producing the album A Beginner’s Guide to COMA and a series of festivals called Day of Music. Founded by Titus Levi and Eric Potruch, COMA officially launched on March 3, 1983, when the two founders passed out a flyer describing COMA’s planned activities. This flyer came to be known as The COMA Manifesto. COMA's goals included bringing an eclectic scope of artists from diverse genres, for concerts and festivals. Genres included (but were not limited to) jazz, jazz rock, progressive rock, experimental 20th century compositions, ambient music music-concrete, free-jazz, post-rock improvisation, experimental rap, and multicultural/trans-cultural experiments.

COMA produced its first live performance event in July 1983 at a small art gallery in Downtown Long Beach. The format of the concert would form the template of the Day of Music events: solo performers and small ensembles playing sequentially over several hours. In this case, the performances started at noon and ended at 10:00 PM. At the Day of Music events, which launched in 1988, events started at noon and ran until midnight. They took place in multiple venues in the Pine Avenue area of Downtown Long Beach, including the gallery-café-performance space System M, a restaurant called Mum’s, and multiple gallery spaces on Pine Avenue, Broadway, and Third Street in Downtown Long Beach. In 1985 the group produced a full-length LP on Rotary Totem Records called A Beginner’s Guide to COMA. This ten-song disc included music from a number of rock-leaning performers, including Dogma Probe, Elma Mayer, Tao Mao, The Underpeople, Mark Soden, The Motor Totemist Guild, Cartoon, Newcross, 5UUs, and Rhythm Plague.

The activities and impact of COMA have been documented in at least two research papers, Jarle Glesåen Storløkken’s COMA - American avant rock: a study of the music of avant rock bands and Charles Sharp’s book-length dissertation Improvisation, Identity, and Tradition: Experimental Music Communities in Los Angeles.

Discography

A Beginner’s Guide to COMA 1985, Rotary Totem Records, RTR-LP-003[1]

Members and affiliates

Venues
  • Club Lhasa
  • Anti-Club
  • Safari Sam's
  • KXLU Radio
  • Helen's Place
  • System M/M Bar
  • Mums
  • James Armstrong Theatre
  • KCRW Radio
  • Art Matrix
  • Long Beach Public Library Auditorium
  • Hop Singh's
  • Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center
  • KPFK Radio
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References
  1. http://www.discogs.com/Various-A-Beginners-Guide-To-Coma/release/1714282
  2. https://www.facebook.com/TurnaroundJazzRockFusion

Sources
  • Sharp, Charles M. Improvisation, identity and tradition: Experimental music communities in Los Angeles. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2008.
  • Storløkken, Jarle Glesåen. COMA - American avant rock: a study of the music of avant rock bands Thinking Plague,Motor Totemist Guild, U Totem and 5UU's and their relationship with 1970s progressive rock. Master’s thesis, University of Oslo, Norway, 2008.

Press
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