It's best to start with Charlie Parker.
March 12, 1955: the wizard of bebop sax, the young man loved by the gods, the bird of Kansas City, bid the world farewell before his time. Bird’s Lament is the funeral ode that Moondog —Louis Thomas Hardin— composed in his memory: a nocturnal phrase of eternal beauty. In its scant two minutes, it contains all of Moondog: the purity of simplicity and the suspended atmosphere that he alone knew how to create. The voices of the brass draw lines of streetlights, and the smell of New York lingers on you. Where else could Charlie “Bird” Parker and Moondog, both born in the rural state of Kansas, live if not in New York, the magical north star of new music?
We are still in New York, on any given day between the Forties and the Sixties. Always the same purity. Between Fifty-Third and Sixth with his primitive and baroque music, Moondog is intent on redrawing the sound map of his world. The street, a small universe of goings-on, each with its tone, each imagined, each transcribed into percussive fragments.
This is who Louis T. Hardin was: a dog who longs for the moon and runs with an odd rhythm. His music opens a space, always left open in inconclusive dynamism: “I’m not gonna die in 4/4 time!” he once exclaimed.
Percussion and counterpoint, paradoxical coordinates of his baroque primitivism, breathe together like a living organism.
This is who Moondog was: the one who knew how to graft, like no other, the airy and unexpected movement of jazz into the austere structure of baroque music, giving new life to the old or creating new instruments when the old ones could not suffice for his way of understanding music.
…
Perhaps it was snowing that day in 1974 when Moondog arrived in the longed-for land of Europe. Surely, blindness could not obscure the vision of a dreamed world: the taste and melancholy of snow showed themselves for what they were. Always that purity, which Moondog's opaque eyes, breathing the air of a desired Germany, could finally see.
Or perhaps it was summer. Like July 4, 1932, when the freshly applied white paint on the fence slowly dried, in an unspecified place in America, in the summer breeze. Who knows. Candidly that day, a boy picked up his destiny from the ground, without knowing it was a detonator. Louis Hardin was sixteen when his eyes lost their usefulness forever. But that matters little. Hands are enough to build new instruments and hearing to test their sound. Everything else is unnecessary.
Smoothing space by striking taut membranes, Moondog seems to have learned it —in a blurred time, forgotten forever— from Native Americans. As for constructing baroque counterpoints, no one knows. The fact is that time passed, always in the same direction. There came the day when New York, his city, with a slight nod, greeted him after so long. Thus he replied:
New Amsterdam was her name
Before she was New York
New Amsterdam is a dame
The heart and soul of big apple city
No matter what name she goes under
I dig her deeply
And no wonder
For she's been lovely to me
And I'm the better
For having met her
It was 1989, in Brooklyn. But I no longer remember when exactly. Time crumbles between hands.
By now Moondog no longer beats drums with a tattered cloak on his shoulders. By now the pavement of Sixth Avenue barely remembers its Viking Louis T. Hardin. A new millennium has come, with no more Moondog.
But his music will forever spread that purity.
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