Moondog

[7/4]

October 28, 2007

Music

Sidewalk Hero, on the Horns of a Revival

By JOHN STRAUSBAUGH, NYTimes

Plenty of chamber music festivals have featured works by Bach, Beethoven and Mozart. Or Charles Ives, Elliott Carter and Leon Kirchner.

But a festival that includes music by Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Ives, Carter and Kirchner, all playing second fiddle to the classical works of Moondog?

“Moondog Rising,” which takes place on Friday and Saturday at Advent Lutheran Church in Manhattan, is surely the first. The Viking of Sixth Avenue, as he was known, would be proud.

From the late 1940s to the early ’70s Moondog was as recognizable in the New York City landscape as the Empire State Building, and nearly as striking. A tall blind man with long hair and beard, wearing a handmade Viking helmet and primitive cloak, he regularly stationed himself at Sixth Avenue and 54th Street, which cops and cabbies knew as Moondog’s Corner. Dispensing his poetry, politics, sheet music and recordings (some on boutique labels, some on majors), he was sought out over the years by beats, hippies and foreign tourists, but also by the media and celebrities, from Walter Winchell and “Today” to Marlon Brando, Muhammad Ali and Martin Scorsese.

“Everybody who was anybody met Moondog,” Robert Scotto, author of “Moondog,” a biography published this month by Process Books, said recently. “And everybody had his own Moondog.”

Even after he moved to Germany in 1974, where he remained until his death in 1999 at 83, he was remembered in New York as an emblematic street character, though not as a serious classical composer. As the British music critic Kenneth Ansell observed in the mid-’90s, while jazz greats like Count Basie and Charlie Parker admired Moondog’s idiosyncratic forays into their world, “the classical orthodoxy has not rushed to embrace him.”

Robin Boomer, a cellist and the organizer of Moondog Rising, said: “Most of the people I know from the classical music world don’t know Moondog at all. He hasn’t made it into the canon.”

Part of the problem is that Moondog was so prolific and eclectic. Working in Braille, often composing under his cloak on the sidewalk, he wrote in an impressively wide range of styles: percussion-driven exotica (he made his own triangular drum-and-cymbal instrument, the trimba), avant-garde jazz, folkish madrigals, Bach-like neo-Baroque rounds and canons for chamber orchestra, symphonies for full orchestra, and a layered minimalism that influenced his young collaborators Steve Reich and Philip Glass. (They can be heard playing with Moondog in the 1960s on a sampler CD included in Mr. Scotto’s book, for which Mr. Glass wrote the preface.)

He released more than a dozen recordings, and his music was used in films and television commercials. His songs were sung by Janis Joplin (on “Big Brother & the Holding Company”) and Julie Andrews (a children’s album); he once shared a bill in a Greenwich Village club with Tiny Tim and Lenny Bruce, and much later performed on a festival stage in London at the invitation of Elvis Costello.

Still, acceptance as a modern classical composer has eluded him. The atavistic streak symbolized by the Viking helmet can be heard in the work, which was melodic and tuneful at a time when atonality and dissonance often ruled. Mostly it sounds more like Bach, Beethoven and Mozart than Ives, Carter or Kirchner. Ms. Boomer said that was why music by those composers would be played along with Moondog’s at the two-night festival, so audiences can compare and contrast.

Born Louis Hardin Jr., in Kansas, the son of an Episcopal minister, Moondog was raised in various Plains states. At 16, he was blinded while tinkering with a blasting cap. He became a voracious autodidact of music, literature, history and philosophy. He renamed himself Moondog for a howling bulldog he had loved as a boy, and developed a worldview that embraced Norse mythology and Viking culture as the pinnacles of European civilization.

He was 27 when he came to New York in 1943 and quickly established his eccentric status. Although often mistaken for homeless, he always had a room somewhere (he lived for a year in the ’60s with Mr. Glass and JoAnne Akalaitis), and was married for a period and raised a daughter. His many hours on the street were his way of connecting with the sounds, voices and rhythms of the city.

That’s where Mr. Scotto, a professor of English at Baruch College of the City University of New York, first met him as a college student in the mid-’60s. “He was the avant-garde figure par excellence, the ultimate hippie,” Mr. Scotto recalled. “He was a pilgrimage that all college students made.”

Mr. Scotto sought out Moondog again in Europe in the mid-1980s. Moondog’s German friends had convinced him by then to set aside the Viking helmet and cloak, which they scoffingly referred to as his “amateur Odin” costume, referring to the figure from Norse mythology.

Ms. Boomer first heard of Moondog in the ’80s from a jazz musician who “was aghast that I didn’t know him.” Pursuing a master’s degree in arts administration at Columbia University last year, she began to research Moondog’s life and works. What she originally planned as a small lecture and performance grew into “what I refer to as the Exploding Moondog Festival,” she said. “It just got bigger and bigger,” with her own 20-piece Eupraxia Players joined by musicians from around the country and Europe.

In his preface to “Moondog” Mr. Glass writes that he and Mr. Reich “took his work very seriously and understood and appreciated it much more than what we were exposed to at Julliard.”

Ms. Boomer said she hoped to spread that appreciation.

[Randy Twizzle]

[AndrewHill]

I was just reading a Moondog thread in the "Artists" section yesterday, all because I saw a used cd copy of Moondog's "More." Interesting guy. And I think I'm going to pick up that disk.