Birdie Busch/Courtesy of the artist
by Patrick Jarenwattananon
Regular NPR listeners know Tom Moon as one of the fellows who regularly talks about new CDs at the ends of hours on All Things Considered. Philadelphia area music fans may also know him for his long tenure as a critic at the Philadelphia Inquirer. Or even if you're neither a frequent listener nor Philly resident, you may have read his marvelously eclectic book 1,000 Recordings To Hear Before You Die.
Tom Moon also plays the saxophone; he studied music at the University of Miami, and spent time in the Maynard Ferguson Orchestra, among other professional opportunities. But he largely put his career in music on hold to focus on journalism; by 2008, he hadn't recorded his own material in some 20-odd years.
So it was a bit of a surprise to see him just issue his sophomore release, Into The Ojalá, with a band he calls the Moon Hotel Lounge Project. Like Moon's criticism, there's ample room for jazz in his aesthetic, but that's certainly not all there is; dreamy Latin rhythms and spacey, almost downtempo grooves suffuse the recording.
Patrick Jarenwattananon: So the biggest question is: Why? Why, after 20-plus years away from the studio, did the music need to come out then and there? I think of this great quotation that Shaun Brady extracted from you: "To bring music into this overcrowded world that's already choking with music is an act of some arrogance."
Tom Moon: Why not? There is no rulebook for music, as you know, or for that matter, music journalism. There's nobody up in the Critic Central Ivory Tower telling scribes how to behave, setting down lines that cannot be crossed. One key trait of culture in the Internet era has to do with fluidity — people who work in one discipline can, with the necessary skills and gumption, take a flying leap into another discipline. I'd argue this is healthy. If you're here to grow as a human being, you find yourself trying things all the time.
What happened to me is fairly typical of a phenomenon that might be called "downsized into creativity." After the book I did [1,000 Recordings], I discovered that the entire dynamic of freelancing had changed: Without a steady platform, I found myself spending much more time hustling writing work than actually writing. That was a recipe for frustration, and as I have always done at any crisis point in life, I turned to music.
Over a period of time I began to revisit tunes I'd started years before. That investigation sparked new tunes. And that got me thinking I should get out of the attic and play with people again. And so on. Before I knew it, I was in it. I didn't start out trying to make a record: I started out curious to see if, after a long time away, I could communicate through music. What I found surprised me.
PJ: How did you fall into writing about music in the first place? If I may be a bit blunt, your biographical sketch leads one to believe your career as a performer wasn't exactly on the fast track to Saxophone Colossus Status when you began focusing on journalism, those cruise-ship gigs notwithstanding ...
TM: I studied music in the jazz program at the University of Miami, at a time (1979-1983) when the place was exploding with talent. By the semester break of my freshman year, I already knew I'd never have the requisite technique to become a titan of the instrument. I quickly made peace with that; we have enough titans. Instead I focused on tone and on composition, and was incredibly lucky to study with Ron Miller, the composer, who was the first person to encourage what he heard as an "original" voice.
Around that same time, a friend told me that the student newspaper was giving away records and if you agreed to write a few reviews you could walk away with a stack of stuff. I was fairly obsessed with music, so this seemed like a good deal, and I started writing little reviews. One of the highlights of that was getting a copy of Steely Dan's Gaucho on the day it came out, and having to listen quickly and write something on deadline for the first time. It wasn't very good criticism, but I got swept up in the challenge of it.
After a year or so I stopped writing for the school paper because I was busy playing gigs. But I still read the local paper (The Miami Herald), and when I was a senior at UM I wrote a series of letters complaining about the music coverage there.
On the third volley an exasperated editor said, "Do you think you can do better?" I said yes. So they sent me to cover jazz concerts — they'd publish their staff writer but read my reviews and give me advice. After I few weeks, they started publishing my stuff. I was incredibly lucky to have patient editors who were willing to take time to literally teach me how to do it.
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