"Downtown music" refers literally to the area below 14^th Street in Manhattan, where, in the 1970s, the "loft scene" got underway—an alternative to the calcifying conventional jazz (and classical) scene, in which young avant-garde musicians played concerts in each other's downtown lofts. More recently, the term has come to stand for any music—though it still tends to be concentrated in Lower Manhattan—that blurs or transcends categories. It tends to be contrasted with "uptown music," whose paragon is Wynton Marsalis and his Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, which emphasizes relatively straight readings of the jazz repertoire (and a repertoire that ends around 1965, at that). Very recently, uptown/downtown itself has begun to blur—or at least the divide between them, once as solid and impassible as the Berlin Wall, has grown more porous and the cultural guardians a bit less strict.