Moondog - The Viking Of Sixth Avenue
SKU
05-HJR018
Eagerly, hugely anticipated - at least by me - new release of some of the earliest, rarest material by Moondog. Moondog was a mostly self-taught blind composer who was a fixture on streetcorners in Manhatthan from the 1940's through the early 1970's, playing his compositions for whatever passersby would give him and also selling printed music. He befriended Charlie Parker and Benny Goodman among others, and my wife remembers cutting out of high school, hitch-hiking to NYC and seeing him on the street corner. He belongs to that rare and wonderful American maverick composer school that produced Charles Ives and Harry Partch, among others.
"This new release from Honest Jon's is the first overview of Moondog's amazing artistic life -- including recordings spanning from 1949 till 1995, with numerous 78s and various other vanished records revived for the first time (not to mention a couple of Weegee photographs!). Though the compilation is rooted in the decades Moondog regularly lived rough in New York City, performing on street corners -- 'the Viking Of Sixth Avenue' -- at the same time it lays the music's claim to the future. Moondog was born Louis Thomas Hardin on May 26, 1916, in Marysville, Kansas. Noting the five-year-old's interest in percussion, his father -- an Episcopal minister -- took him to see an Arapaho Sun Dance. During the ritual the budding musician was allowed to sit on Chief Yellow Calf's lap and play the tom-tom. This experience -- and later playing tom-tom and flute with the Blackfoot tribe in Idaho at another Sun Dance -- would have a profound and lasting effect on the development of his own music and ideas..."
- LabelHonest Jon's
- UPC4047179077620