This is the première release of Julius Eastman's Femenine, for chamber ensemble. It is also the work's only known recording, documenting a 1974 performance by the S.E.M. Ensemble (with the composer on piano) which has lain unheard for decades.

The music of Julius Eastman (1940-1990) is enjoying an on-going period of rediscovery. Known best in the past for his work with figures like Peter Maxwell Davies, Arthur Russell and Meredith Monk, today his own formidable compositions draw increasing admiration.

Joyous, insistent, and immersive, Femenine bathes the listener in surges of tonal colour from intertwining winds, piano, violin, pitched percussion, synthesizer and - uniquely - the composer's own invention of mechanised sleigh bells, which provide the 72-minute piece with its characteristic pulse.

Illuminating sleeve notes are provided by composer and author Mary Jane Leach, who is co-editor of Gay Guerrilla, the recently released collection of essays on Eastman's life and music.

This 1974 performance of Femenine is a marvel of open-form minimalism, a rare recording of the undersung avant-garde composer and pianist that heralds the powerful voice of the black, queer artist.

According to all eyewitness accounts, Julius Eastman was hard to ignore. He was lithe, he had a five-octave voice and an improviser's intelligence at the piano. When he was healthy, Eastman was sought out by famed conductor Pierre Boulez. He played jazz in a combo that frequented clubs in Buffalo, contributed synths and vocals to an experimental disco outfit organized by Arthur Russell, and sang in early groups led by Meredith Monk. As a queer African-American member of the avant-garde, he cut a unique figure in the 1970s by necessity. Composer and trombonist George Lewis remembers that, to him, Eastman represented "a singular figure of presence" in those years, since "black artists were far less in evidence in the Downtown New York music scene than queer ones."

While in the company of such elites, Eastman challenged the norms of etiquette with a potency that guaranteed scandal. His explicit, queer reframing of John Cage's Song Books famously enraged Cage himself. And Eastman's confrontational "nigger series" of compositions-including pieces like Nigger Faggot, Crazy Nigger, and Evil Nigger-were sometimes truncated on concert bills, due to pressure from well-meaning protestors and risk-averse programmers. These were moves that obscured Eastman's stated desire to face up to "that thing which is fundamental" in American society. He contained so much art and vision as to be a scene unto himself. Then he faded from view.

After alienating lovers and collaborators alike, Eastman was evicted from his apartment in the mid-'80s. Most of his scores were bagged and carted away-eventually lost to history. Details from his homeless period are sketchy (or contested), but it's generally agreed that he lived in Tompkins Square Park and also suffered from some form of addiction. After he died, alone in a Buffalo hospital at age 49, it took eight months for an obituary to be published.

Eastman can be almost as fascinating to read about as he is to listen to. Yet for a long time, hardly anyone pursued either activity-largely because much of his music had been scattered to the winds prior to his death in 1990. Thankfully, the last decade has seen a renaissance in Eastman appreciation. Contemporaries like Kyle Gann and Mary Jane Leach have pooled rare recordings and fragments of scores, and found new material in archives. In 2005, a three-CD set on New World Records, Unjust Malaise, brought several of Eastman's most notorious compositions into wide circulation. Jace Clayton reinterpreted two of those works on a 2013 album. And along with Renée Levine Packer, Leach has edited an important book of essays covering every aspect of Eastman's career. Still, the primary stumbling block to any greater revelry has been a lack of recorded evidence of Eastman's own performances.

The release of Femenine, however, is an occasion for wide celebration. In terms of sonic fidelity, this is an occasionally scratchy live recording of a chamber orchestra performance from November 6, 1974, with Eastman at the piano. In creative terms, it's a crystal-clear, 72-minute shot that reaffirms what all the veteran scholars and performers have been talking about for decades. Though it doesn't offer an expansive look at his compositional growth like Unjust Malaise, it gives us a better sense of Eastman as a bandleader and performer of his own works. Better than any recording currently circulating, it's on Femenine that listeners can get a sense of how Eastman fused jazz-informed improvisation with the rigors of early, pulse-based minimalism.

And there is also a suggestion of Eastman's humor-an attribute sometimes overshadowed by the seriousness of his politics and the tragedy of his death. The first sound you hear on this recording is an audience casually settling down. And then there is laughter, as a performer switches on a mechanical device that shakes sleigh bells. In an era before drum programming, inhuman percussion had a jokey, improbable tinge. Artists in the Fluxus movement outfitted a violin with a rod-twirling motor that slapped away like the meekest torture device imaginable.

For Femenine, Eastman's machine automated the shaking of sleigh bells for the entirety of the performance. It can be read as both a Fluxus-style joke on the stark rhythmic processes of Philip Glass and Steve Reich, as well as an assumption of that sound into the overall Eastman palette. That Eastman could simultaneously be a prankster and a skilled style-scout was one aspect of his genius; whereas he'd copped R&B textures for a prior composition, Stay on It, with Femenine, Eastman was scouring his avant-garde contemporaries for inspiration. He gave as much as he took, too. As Leach told the musician and writer David Menestres, Femenine offers "the fluidity of jazz and a swing that is missing from, especially, Reich."

In the recording's opening minutes, Eastman plays a few chords and notes as the other members of the chamber ensemble tune up. Before too long, the piece begins in earnest with a catchy vibraphone line: one that starts with fast, one-note repetition, before ascending in see-saw fashion up a narrow interval. Along with the bells' rhythm, this vibraphone motif-both optimistic and energetic-is the backbone of the piece. Aside from that, it's up to Eastman and the other members of his orchestra to sustain the audience's interest over the next hour.

The length of the performance was a grid that Eastman used to guide his ensemble's improvisations. Each member had a digital clock, as well as brief passages of scored material that corresponded to a particular minute-mark in the performance. Choices left up to individual performers might have to do with octave placement, or with the selection of a given note from a particular chord. Another direction in the score is more explicit: "pianist will interrupt." Like other minimalists, Eastman knew how to get a lot of mileage out of means that look scant on the page.

Overall, the assembled string and wind players can hang with Eastman-an impressive feat, since this performance included some players who were much less familiar with the composer than others. There are brief fumbles in the ensemble, at some points, but nothing that can derail the performance, as it's Eastman who holds everything together at the piano. Over time, it's the intuitive authority of his largely improvised piano part that emerges as the major attraction of this set. He stays in the background during the initial playing, allowing that vibraphone part to really carve out a space in the listener's consciousness. Once that hypnotic effect is achieved, Eastman starts pulling from his personal dictionary of styles and influences, all while staying relatively close to the melodic material he gave to the other players.

Femenine was an early example of Eastman's "organic music" concept-a version of minimalism which allowed for all previously played material to be present in later stages of a performance. Years after this gig, Eastman would tell an audience that he was still trying to perfect this approach. But there are hints of his success with it here, thanks to a steady accretion of ideas that never throws Femenine off balance. Ten minutes in, there are strong hints of the blues coming from Eastman's piano. Soon after, he steadily adds new chords to a jazzy, rollicking piano line that syncopates with the vibraphone theme. Gradually, the harmony is built out to a point of richness that recalls Romantic-era classical composers.

After nearly half an hour, the flute player of the S.E.M. Ensemble works in tandem with Eastman on an extended, ascending progression. A quarter of an hour later, when Eastman shifts down several octaves, he creates a massively booming, bass-heavy crunch. While he manages to put the recording a little in the red, the intensity and volume of this choice can't obliterate the essential joy of Femenine.

Remembrances of the show included in this album's liner notes inform us that Eastman appeared in a dress for the concert. The audience was also served soup. That convivial group spirit is alive on this recording, even at its loudest or roughest edges. The piece's semi-notated structure and expanded performance timeframe present a question of genre that is pointedly never resolved. But the force of Eastman's performance shows his own mastery of this ambiguity. His spirit of offering isn't merely strong enough to survive the openness of the form, it is enhanced by this radical flexibility.

Though never intended as an album as such, the first appearance of Femenine is nonetheless a major landmark in both Eastman's posthumous narrative and the story of the American avant-garde. In the recent scholarly volume edited by Packer and Leach, there is a tantalizing list of other Eastman-led performances, currently available only at the music library of the University of Buffalo. The artistic value of this archival release-imperfect sonics and all-begs for an arrangement that will make the rest of Eastman's genius widely accessible.