On April 29, 1979, Michael Holman hosted the Canal Zone Party at Canal and
Greenwich Street. The band went by the names Test Pattern, Bad Fools, and Channel 9 before Basquiat named the band Gray after ''
Gray's Anatomy'', a book his mother gave him as a child. Dawson played trumpet, Clifford played a keyboard, Holman drums and Basquiat played clarinet, guitar, and the
Wasp synthesizer. Holman recalled, "We played this angry, blaring, loud, confrontational music. Sometimes it was kind of mellow too, but it was very minimal." Gray performed at nightclubs such as
Max's Kansas City,
CBGB,
Hurrah and the
Mudd Club. They described their music as "ignorant," which was defined as "carelessly done or casually created work of art or sound or music that should not have worked but [actually] worked brilliantly." After Gray performed at the Mudd Club in the summer of 1981, Basquiat left the band to focus on being an artist. The original Gray lineup never released a record, but their song "Drum Mode" appeared on the soundtrack of
Edo Bertoglio's film
Downtown 81 (2000), starring Basquiat. Set in the downtown New York scene, it was filmed in late 1980 and early 1981. Gray reunited in 1988 to perform at Basquiat's memorial service. They came together again for the 1996 film
Basquiat, directed by
Julian Schnabel. In the 1990s, Holman and Taylor created sonic music performances at clubs such as Club USA, Sybarite,
Nuyorican Poets Cafe and
The Ritz, where they opened for
Todd Rundgren. Gray released their debut album,
Shades Of..., in 2010 on Plush Safe Records. Reviewing the 27-track album for
GQ, writer
Glenn O'Brien described it as "the soundtrack of a better world." A remastered version of the album with additional remixes was released on
Ubiquity Records in 2019. It features the work of producers such as Todd Rundgren,
Hank Shocklee,
Deantoni Parks, Mike Tewz, and
King Britt. Since re-launching Gray in 2011, Holman and Taylor have performed live for select appearances at art institutions, including the
New Museum (2011), the
Corcoran Gallery of Art (2012) the
Parrish Art Museum (2012), and with
Questlove at the
Brooklyn Academy of Music (2012). They were scheduled to perform at the
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2020. In 2022, the
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts mounted the exhibition
Seeing Loud: Basquiat and Music, which surveyed the influence of music in Basquiat's life and career. Gray was featured prominently in the exhibition. == Discography ==