New York’s 1960s avant-garde scene was seeded by West Coast emigres.

Evidence

Although he was born in Mineola, Long Island, and riffed in a pronounced New York accent, Bruce was not a Village product. He picked up much of his jazz cadence and hipster vocabulary from Buckley, with whom he had worked LA strip joints. Like the Beat Generation and Ornette Coleman, Bruce brought an improvisational West Coast sensibility to town. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 285

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s goal of identifying material/social conditions behind invention density: migration from the West Coast as a catalyst for the Village scene.
• QUESTION: Worth investigating how much of the early 60s Village avant-garde was West Coast transplants versus native New Yorkers — a possible quantitative angle.