|
|
|
Bach meets Moondog
Queen Elizabeth Hall, London
15 November 2006
The 29-volume Grove Dictionary
of Music can't spare a paragraph for Kansas-born Louis Hardin, who took
the name Moondog after being blinded as a teenager, but grander figures
have given him his due. Stravinsky vouched in court for his greatness,
Steve Reich and Philip Glass acknowledged him as their precursor, and
Charlie Parker was planning to collaborate with him, before heroin got
in the way. With his flowing beard, Moondog looked like William Blake's
God the Father; his quest for the perfect canon, coupled with his experiments
with rhythm, took him to a place where others now gladly follow.
When I interviewed him during
his last visit to London for the Meltdown festival, he explained that
his rhythms came from the Arapaho Indians: "The running beat, and
alongside it the walking beat, which is also the universal heartbeat."
Joanna MacGregor is his latest champion: introducing her arrangement of
14 of his pieces for the Britten Sinfonia - with saxophonist Andy Sheppard,
plus a tabla player, bassist and percussionist - she expressed the modest
hope that they'd do them justice. But from the first bright explosion
of sound that justice was never in doubt.
The rhythm was everywhere in
evidence, clothed in a medley of forms. Some pieces had brass and percussion
all going on one note; others evoked foghorns on the Hudson, or sirens
in the street. One wittily deconstructed ragtime, while another brought
us to bebop. But nothing was swung: underneath it all was that cheerful
heartbeat, keeping strict time as befitted this edgy, urban music. Each
piece was completely different: the most arresting had - over a ritualistically
repeated string phrase - a saxophone ballad that was at once lugubrious
and sly. No wonder Parker had wanted to join in.
The first half of this concert was devoted to MacGregor's jazz reworking
of that contrapuntal Everest, Bach's The Art of Fugue. Britten Sinfonia
- to whom I must apologise for inadvertently calling them the London Sinfonietta
in a review last week - dealt adroitly with this extraordinary work, which
required them to switch seamlessly between classical and jazz modes. This
band can do anything, and make it look effortless fun. Much the same can
be said of the dreadlocked MacGregor, dashing between piano stool and
centre stage, to keep the evening's frantic pulse at fever pitch.
The Independent
|
|
