NEW YORK, NY.- For 45 years, Peter Gordon has held onto a reel-to-reel tape of a show he performed in 1979 at the Mudd Club in New York City with a trio called the Blue Horn File. Gordon, violinist Laurie Anderson and percussionist David Van Tieghem — a group of new music all-stars — did a short set with the playful and unshackled feel of cartoon music. It was one of only three shows the Blue Horn File played.

Gordon, a saxophonist, composer and bandleader who has been a mainstay of downtown music for decades, has recorded for several different labels. But he decided to take a different path with these tapes: This week, he is releasing “The Blue Horn File at Mudd Club” as one of the first titles on Adjacent Records, his new digital-only label.

“It eliminates the middleman,” he said. “With record companies, people second guess at every point what’s going to work or not work. It’s really about setting up artistic freedom, from creation to distribution.”

In the course of his restless, mutable career, Gordon, 72, has written all kinds of music, from classical pieces for solo piano or chamber orchestra to dance scores and experimental operas. But he also has used his classical background to write disco-kissed rock music for the long-running group he formed in 1977, Love of Life Orchestra.

He isn’t as well-known as some of the people he’s worked with, like Anderson, novelist Kathy Acker, choreographer Bill T. Jones, the singular cellist Arthur Russell, or David Byrne; or the people he’s studied with, including the founding minimalists Terry Riley and Pauline Oliveros, with whom he played in a klezmer band. “But he’s known by the right people,” said Tim Burgess, frontman of the Charlatans U.K. and another of Gordon’s many collaborators.

Gordon is Mr. Adjacent: “Adjacent” is more than the name of his label, it’s a description of his music, which sits in a distinct Venn diagram of influences, including jazz, classical and rock, often with R&B at the center. The one constant is a kind of populist experimentation: He makes music that’s surprising but also accessible.

LCD Soundsystem singer James Murphy said he “fell in love with Peter’s music right away.” Murphy released a compilation, “Peter Gordon & Love of Life Orchestra,” on his DFA label in 2010. (Love of Life Orchestra will play at Bowery Electric in New York City on May 3.)

Despite Gordon’s classical bona fides, Murphy said, his music isn’t academic or aloof. “The nature of his music is convivial,” he said. “No matter how challenging the structure, it’s a party.”

Gordon has been part of several influential music scenes, and his biography traces the path laid by American musicians to escape the influence of European Serialism. He was born in New York City, but when he was 3, his family moved to northern Virginia.

“We were between two worlds, North and South, and between two eras, segregation and civil rights,” Gordon said in an interview at the Washington Heights apartment he shares with his wife, video artist Kit Fitzgerald, in upper Manhattan. “There were kids in my elementary school who would not salute the flag on Lincoln’s Birthday.”

He was close to Washington, D.C., and spent hours running around the unsecured basements of congressional buildings and taking piano lessons from Don Agger, a journalist and brother-in-law of Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas. Also, he could tune in Deep South radio stations that played Motown as well as rougher R&B.

Gordon’s mother was a psychologist, and his father was a journalist for Voice of America. (He was a writer for The New York Times before Peter was born.) When Peter was 12, his father was transferred to the Voice of America bureau in Munich. German clubs mostly ignored age restrictions, so he was able to see lots of jazz, including Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington; and rock, notably the Rolling Stones and the Jeff Beck lineup of the Yardbirds.

After five years in Munich, the Gordons moved to the San Fernando Valley in Southern California. “I was 17 and I didn’t drive,” Gordon said. “I was used to going to jazz clubs and having a beer. It was like being grounded.”

The boredom waned when he discovered that Captain Beefheart, the avant-garde rock singer, lived nearby. Gordon hung around while Beefheart recorded “Trout Mask Replica,” his 1969 magnum opus, and Beefheart instilled in him the belief that music could be fun and smart at the same time.

Gordon spent a summer at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, studying Anton Webern scores and playing sax in a funk band. “It became clear to me that I wasn’t going to be a jazz cat,” he said. “I couldn’t replicate Charlie Parker’s solos, so I had to learn to make my own music.”

Gordon visited a friend at the University of California, San Diego, and discovered its electronic music program: “It seemed like my destiny.” The school had a futurist mandate as well as early models of the Moog and Buchla synthesizers, which were located in Quonset huts left behind by the Marine Corps, the campus’s previous occupants. “There was no respect for any kind of vernacular music,” Gordon said. “Tonality was forbidden.”

“Peter was an early adopter — he was always ahead of the game,” said guitarist and music scholar Ned Sublette, who met Gordon when both were grad students at UCSD. After alternative opera composer Robert Ashley came down from Mills College in Oakland and gave a performance that Gordon found “both vernacular and radical at the same time,” Gordon transferred there, moving to the Bay Area with Acker, who was his girlfriend.

At Mills, he studied with Ashley and Terry Riley, whose landmark piece “In C” (1968) had captivated him. “It was like, Wow! This is the music I’ve been looking for,” he said. In an email, Riley called Gordon “one of the most brilliant students I taught at Mills.”

Gordon began to imagine a fusion of his influences: Riley, some Jeff Beck, some Captain Beefheart, and a lot of the hard-honking R&B sax sound of Junior Walker and King Curtis. Minimalism and funk share a common element, he realized: repetition.

In 1975, he moved to New York City with Acker, who quickly became renowned for her transgressive, blood-soaked prose. She “often behaved like a child, and a bratty one at that,” her biographer Jason McBride wrote, and she was disliked by many of Gordon’s friends. “She had very dark spirals,” Gordon said, “which could be fascinating and compelling.”

“She would probably be considered bipolar now,” he continued, adding: “We also had moments of normal life. And she was non-compromising, which influenced me.” After splitting up, they collaborated in 1985 on “The Birth of the Poet,” a modern opera with stage design by painter David Salle and direction by Richard Foreman. (Artforum called it “confusingly incoherent,” and a New York Times review noted a “barrage of boos” when it ended.) Gordon had more success that same year with other productions, and won an Obie Award for “Otello,” a deconstruction of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera.

In New York, Gordon easily found like-minded musicians, including Russell, guitar minimalist Rhys Chatham and Julius Eastman. In the previous generation, composers Steve Reich, Philip Glass and La Monte Young established the practice of having performing ensembles, an idea Gordon embraced. But he didn’t want to write scores that had to be played note for note; in a 1975 article in Ear magazine, he denounced Reich for “imposing his fascistic orders” on musicians. (“I mouthed off a lot,” he said when I brought it up.)

Gordon’s generation created a new music that was minimal but not difficult, a melding of high and low art that Bernard Gendron, a cultural critic and philosophy professor, labeled “the borderline aesthetic.” Gordon and his peers liked rock music and, crucially, disco too. Russell, writing under pseudonyms, had dance club hits, including “Kiss Me Again” by Dinosaur, which featured Gordon on sax. Their downtown coterie was equally happy playing at an experimental spot like the Kitchen or a rock dive like CBGB, or dancing at the Paradise Garage. They tried to bring experimentalism to the masses.

There was a time when major record labels released albums of new music, even by avant-gardists like John Cage and Morton Feldman. And there were commercial successes, like Riley’s “In C” and Morton Subotnick’s “Silver Apples of the Moon” (1967). In the mid-’80s, Gordon released two excellent and accessible records, “Innocent” and “Brooklyn,” on the CBS Masterworks crossover imprint FM.

But then the downtown scene “met its Holocaust moment with the AIDS epidemic,” Sublette said. And CBS discovered that while Gordon hadn’t crossed over, sales were growing for New Age artists like their star harpist Andreas Vollenweider. Gordon’s FM contract was not renewed.

There’s also a parallel tradition of new music mavericks starting their own labels: Harry Partch did it in the 1950s, as did, later, the composers Alan Hovhaness, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Oren Ambarchi.

Tommy McCutchon, who started the Unseen Worlds label in 2007, said that with the advent of digital distribution, “it’s a great time for artists to do it themselves.” Several companies provide digital distribution services to independent artists, allowing them to easily send their music to streaming platforms, social media sites like TikTok and Instagram, and other outlets that pay small amounts to musicians.

“It makes less sense to have a label playing middleman when you have the ability to leverage the self-service digital distribution model,” McCutchon said. “Even the biggest vinyl enthusiasts I know listen mostly to digital.”

In addition to “The Blue Horn File,” Gordon’s Adjacent releases include two new Love of Life Orchestra records: “Piety Street Adjacent,” a great, ebullient set recorded in New Orleans with a small rhythm section, and “Peripatetic,” which is more electronic and noirish.

For Gordon, digital distribution is just another emerging music tool, no different from the Buchla synth or MIDI technology. So how much music does he have in his archive?

“I don’t know,” he said with a smile. “How much do you want?”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.