Most of the songs here were recorded on Manhattan, but in many cases were written, sung or played by people who grew up in one of the other boroughs. Regardless of the changing musical styles of pop music over the past century, the Long Island boroughs of Queens (east of Manhattan) and Brooklyn (to the south) have consistently provided the largest proportion of New York's successful music talent - Jewish songwriters and producers, Italian singers, black vocal groups and rappers.

Anybody hoping to make hit records had to run the gauntlet of mid-town Manhattan's Tin Pan Alley, between the famous junction of Broadway and 42nd Street at Times Square and the southern edge of Central Park at 59th Street. Since the mid 1950s, the focal points of New York's live music scene have moved from midtown to other sections of the city, to the coffee houses, jazz clubs and rock venues in and around Greenwich Village, dance halls in Brooklyn, college gymnasiums and outdoor basketball courts of the Bronx and Harlem.

From Billie Holiday and the Drifters via Bob Dylan and Blondie to the Turntable Orchestra, New York's savvy song craftsmen and keen-eared producers pull from their pockets every available sound and idea, finding ways to blend jazz instruments, Latin rhythms and unforgettable rhyming lines to make music that the world claims for its own.

Charlie Gillett