The blind composer
Moondog
(
Louis Hardin
, 1908-1999) is a fascinating figure, hard to classify at even a basic level. He performed for much of his life on the streets of Manhattan in Viking garb, but he was a true composer (using Braille notation), not a naive eccentric. Before there was such a thing as minimalism (
knew and may have influenced the early minimalists), his works had the basic simplicity of open harmonies, but they featured harmonic motion, not static fields. Many were songs of a sort. Some were based in a rhythmic layer, and jazz musicians listened to
with interest, but the rhythms were not those of jazz, but at least in some cases, the Native American beats
absorbed as a child in the West. Even a quarter century after his death, few performers have come to grips with
, and attempts like this by the teamed
Ghost Train Orchestra
and
Kronos Quartet
are most welcome. What listeners get here is largely not what
wrote down; various arrangers have remade them for the present forces. This is not necessarily to the good;
's way of making music may have allowed for a certain amount of flexibility, but he was a composer and generally did not improvise. His attitude toward the recasting of his works may be measured by what happened when
Janis Joplin
recorded the lovely
All Is Loneliness
, heard here; he complained that she "really murdered it." The vocalists here are less aggressive than
Joplin
; they are folk and jazz singers who seem appropriate to the music (
was an untrained singer, although he did play various instruments, some of his own invention), and the music seems true to
's spirit. There remains an opening for a serious traversal of
's music as he conceived and performed it, but the
and the
make a valuable contribution here. ~ James Manheim