Moondog appeared to me while swimming through an Alastair Galbraith jag. He's a scary sight at 3 a.m.
From Derek Taylor at Dusted Records:
The fringes of music are rife with lovable oddballs. Those errant tone scientists that march to their own internal and enigmatic drums and devise music that straddles genres indiscriminately. Or better still, does away with such subjective, often stifling parameters altogether. In this informal academy of the unrepentantly weird, Sun Ra and George Clinton talk shop alongside lesser knowns like Bongo Joe Coleman and Robbie Basho. Moondog aligns easily with the latter company.
A blind street-busking savant, his career stretched across four decades and resulted in a body of music that remains stubbornly unclassifiable to date. While he enjoyed several brushes with notoriety as a composer, he also spent long segments of his life in nearly complete anonymity. A trio of initial albums for Prestige in the late 1950s felt more like field recordings than fully fleshed and financed studio efforts. But they successfully embodied Moondog’s early oeuvre by incorporating examples of his eclectic street corner routines. Experiments with folk forms and rhythmic layerings on homemade instruments mixed with musique concrete montages to create a schematic of the quixotic crannies of his psyche. Even so, many viewed the records as more novelty than coherent artistic statement.
Moondog conscripts a symphonic orchestra made up of numerous classical and jazz studio regulars including Hubert Laws, Don Butterfield, George Duvivier and Ron Carter. “Theme” juxtaposes sawing strings with clattering hollow percussion in a droning mélange that eventually opens out into more lyrical vistas with the coming of the horns. “Symphonique #3”, subtitled “Ode to Venus”, unfolds as a contrapuntal collage, voiced first by delicate strings and later by choir-like woodwinds, each lushly orchestrated, but also slightly saccharine in cast. “Symphonique #6” fares better, a roving blend of swinging writ-large syncopation, ostinato bass and fluttering clarinet dedicated to Benny Goodman. Sprawling Morricone Americana suffuses the “Witch of Endor”, another sectional piece shorn from a larger Moondog orchestrated opera that also has whimsical moments that recall cartoon composer Carl Stalling. Snatches of rhyming spoken word philosophy intersperse several of the pieces adding to the semblance of a guided tour atmosphere. As whole, the session carries the calling cards of a modern impressionistic classical affair fused with pop, operatic and film soundtrack elements. Even so, it’s well beyond the scope of easy categorization.
Technical Information:
Artist: Moondog
Album: Moondog
Year: 1969
Audio Codec(s): FLAC
Encoding: Lossless
Rip: split tracks
Avg. bitrate: 772 Kbps
Sample rate: 44100 Hz
Bits per sample: 16 Bit
Channels: 2
File size: 159 MB
Length: 00:30:56
Tracklisting:
01. Theme (2:36)
02. Stamping Ground (2:36)
03. Symphonique #3 (Ode To Venus) (5:51)
04. Symphonique #6 (Good For Goodie) (2:45)
05. Minsym #1 (5:45)
06. Lament I, "Bird's Lament" (1:42)
07. Witch Of Endor (6:29)
08. Symphonique #1 (Portrait Of A Monarch) (2:36)
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