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 (Moondog 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 Moondog with interest, but the rhythms were not those of jazz, but at least in some cases, the Native American beats Moondog absorbed as a child in the West. Even a quarter century after his death, few performers have come to grips with Moondog, and attempts like this by the teamed Ghost Train Orchestra and Kronos Quartet are most welcome. What listeners get here is largely not what Moondog wrote down; various arrangers have remade them for the present forces. This is not necessarily to the good; Moondogs 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 (Moondog was an untrained singer, although he did play various instruments, some of his own invention), and the music seems true to Moondogs spirit. There remains an opening for a serious traversal of Moondogs music as he conceived and performed it, but the Ghost Train Orchestra and the Kronos Quartet make a valuable contribution here. ~ James Manheim

Rovi