New Yorkers of a certain generation might remember Moondog (Louis T. Hardin), a strange-looking blind man dressed in Viking garb, standing on the sidewalk and collecting spare change. Back in 1971 I spotted Moondog at the corner of 53rd Street and Avenue of the Americas. I dropped a quarter in his cup. Moondog thanked me and handed me a little pamphlet, which I promptly lost. In the late 1970s I found an LP of Moondog’s harpsichord music. It was simplistic stuff, and rather boring. What was all the fuss about? Yet many classical and jazz luminaries considered Moondog a boundary-breaking genius, and in fairness, his 1950s albums proved far more interesting.
Moondog left New York for Germany in 1974, where he enjoyed his most prolific and fruitful composing and performing years prior to his death in 1999. To mark Moondog’s 2016 centennial, Dedalus and Muzzix, two French contemporary-music ensembles, have recreated the 1971 Columbia Masterworks album Moondog 2 in its entirety, minus the composer’s brief spoken couplets. It comprises 25 songs in the form of sung canons, passing through all of the major and minor tonalities, following a cycle of fourths, starting in C major and returning to C major for the 25th song.
The voice parts are doubled by instruments and accompanied by a colorful array of percussion instruments. While the diatonic melodies are attractive and catchy, their quirky phrase structures keep listeners on their toes. The original Moondog 2 featured a baroque-oriented ensemble, with vocals by the composer and his then-teenaged daughter, plus fade-outs at the ends of tracks; the present recreations employ a wider range of instruments and stronger singers.
Some of the original’s intimacy and homespun charm falls by the wayside, yet the gains in timbral, textural, and emotional variety are considerable. Moondog’s texts (not provided, unfortunately, but enunciated clearly enough) are just as whimsical as his titles (such as “No, the Wheel was Never Invented”; “You, the Vandal”; “Why Spend a Dark Night With Me?”), and suit the music’s oddly compelling combination of naiveté and sophistication. Genius or not, Moondog certainly was an American original, whose body of work deserves serious reappraisal.
