"We just want to focus on playing our game and finding our collective play as quickly as we can," he said.
In 1970 the Knicks had won a championship with a one-for-all, all-for-one style that stressed fluid collective play.
The Be collective playing their album One on the Saturday involved classical and drone-rock musicians playing along to the sampled buzzing of a Nottinghamshire beehive.
The Spiritus Collective played an odd but fascinating selection of early-17th-century Italian works for violin, trumpet, sackbuts and continuo.
They answer interview questions as a collective, play in the dark and have song names such as Piss Crowns Are Trebled and We Drift Like Worried Fire.
One section magically echoes the previous solo as the eight dancers line up to form a central spine, arms and legs swinging in a collective play of movement.
"If it were a choice between the saxophone and the clarinet, I think clarinet would be the preference," in the Bay Area, said Matt Ingalls, a clarinetist, composer, and co-founder of SF Sound, a collective playing and promoting contemporary classical music.
It's no coincidence that the demise of the big two up north started when their natural rivals and many other, lesser-endowed clubs developed collective playing systems based on a strong collective ethos.
"You don't have to have a specially built playground — you have this rolling box that's almost like a magician's chest of loose parts," he said, adding that the gear created the chemistry necessary to encourage collective play.
The seven pieces here connect bebop ("At the Vanguard," with its snaking, Charlie Parker-esque line), Coltrane ("After the Rain") and a more recent style of experimental collective playing ("On This Day Just Like Any Other").
