Moondog: Sax Pax for a Sax

I first came across Moondog properly at the end of 2000, after I bought this Kronos Quartet CD for D. She particularly loved the piece by Moondog (a.k.a. Louis Hardin) on that album, which led me to buy her a Moondog album and also check him out myself. I'm pretty sure I'd seen his records seventeen or eighteen years earlier, in the same racks as Klaus Schulze in a Guildford record shop. But back then all I had to go on was the picture on the cover: let's face it, with that cover, the music could have been terrible.

Anyway, this was the first Moondog album I bought, early in 2001. Steve Reich has always said that the swing of jazz is important to him, but this album really moves its hips, while also showing a toned-down version of Reich's formalism. In fact, even if you don't know it, you've probably heard Bird's Lament (in memory of Charlie Parker), because someone did a Stars-on-45 remix of it with a dance beat that is widely used as incidental music on TV and radio. The album in general sounds a bit like some of the more funky Michael Nyman Band music, though Moondog was making music long before Nyman — it's worth reading a bit of his extraordinary biography.

I read the sleevenotes to this just now and was surprised to find out (maybe I'd read it before and forgotten) that both Peter Hammill and Danny Thompson perform on this album. Danny Thompson was apparently a "long-time friend" of Moondog's, though I can find no details of how they might have come to know each other.

MusicBrainz entry for this album