Moonlighting

As the sun sets on old-school music journalism, veteran rock critic Tom Moon enters a new phase.

by Shaun Brady

Photos by Neal Santos

When Tom Moon steps onto the stage at L'Etage at the end of the month, the experience might be comparable to a prison warden getting locked in with the general population. A music critic mustering the courage (or simply gumption) to release his own CD is inevitably accompanied by the sound of knives being sharpened.

"I'm fully aware that there's a huge 'Kick Me' sign on my back," Moon admits. "I provide a very unusual target."

Not that picking up the saxophone is some kind of midlife-crisis-inspired novelty for Moon. The instrument has always sat alongside his writing desk, even if it gathered a bit of dust over the past 20 years or so. But before his contributions to NPR's All Things Considered, before his two-decade stint as a critic at the Inquirer, before he penned 1000 Recordings To Hear Before You Die or saw his byline in Rolling Stone, GQ, Blender or Spin, Moon was a University of Miami School of Music graduate who toured professionally with the Maynard Ferguson Orchestra. His new CD, Into the Ojalá, is the belated follow-up to his 1988 debut, Sentiments by Rote.

Back then, it made more financial sense to pursue writing than music, especially for a tenor player who was admittedly "never going to be a titan." But place any two journalists in a room these days, preferably fueled by a couple of beers, even more preferably on someone else's tabs, and they (we) will inevitably bemoan the current state of the profession, with shrinking opportunities and ailing publications in the age of that almighty ogre, the Internet.

For most writers, the business has been suffering a slow decline, akin to a withering, lengthy illness. But Moon spent three years away from the daily freelance grind while researching and writing 1000 Recordings prior to its 2008 release. When he returned to find several formerly reliable outlets suddenly unresponsive, it was as sudden as a heart attack.

"I was in this weird place of having been in an isolation chamber for the three years I was working on this book," Moon says. "I discovered at the end that the world changed completely and people who had been interested in and receptive to music ideas were suddenly saying, 'We can't use you anymore.' These things happened one at a time, but I experienced them as a cluster because I was essentially coming back and starting from zero."

Suddenly finding himself with a surfeit of time on his hands, Moon amped up his practice schedule from the two hours a week he'd maintained while deeply engaged in writing to a few hours a day. He also returned to the local jam session scene that he'd largely forgone since the birth of his daughter 12 years earlier, sitting in at Ortlieb's until it closed last year and more recently at the newly thriving sessions at Time.

"When I would go while I was still working for the newspaper, people would know me that way and would always be like, 'Give this guy a few mulligans because he's a writer.' Now, I was seeing people I hadn't seen in years and saying, 'I'm scrambling, I don't know what I'm doing, I'm lost in my life and I'm just trying to play music as a way to stay centered.' Luckily, some of those folks were great musicians, who are much more interested in what we can make happen right now than in what you did before. So I learned a ton just going back and doing that, but it was pretty humbling."

In the past, his jam session excursions had been solely "weekend warrior" diversions, but in light of changing circumstances they began taking on a more cathartic role in Moon's life.

"If you've listened to records for 20 years," he explains, "and almost every time you did at the other end of it was a paycheck, however small, and suddenly the economy has so shifted that you can't get a paycheck, the reaction is all the stages of grief. Anger, denial, bitterness, resentment, all of it. I really wrestled with that, and while doing that I was having this conversation with myself as a musician. I believe music is a lifelong pursuit. You're not going to dust off 20 years of neglect in a short period. But my ears were always working, I had heard a ton of stuff, so I started to sit down at the piano and write."

Moon knows as well as anyone that there's no such thing as a "critic-proof" record, but he has insulated himself from a certain degree of scorn by aiming for vibe rather than virtuosity. Into the Ojalá is all about atmosphere, a blend of bossa, lounge and the New Age-ier end of the ECM Records spectrum. There's a sense of retro space-age contours in its smooth edges and lulling melodies, evoking the rounded surfaces and bold colors of a Kubrickian spaceport, with a hint of touristy Latin inflections.

Far from being a left-handed compliment, the "lounge" aspects of Moon's music are part of the design, inspired by the upscale lobbies in which he spent many a tedious hour during his 1000 Recordings book tour. Sitting in a Starbucks at 16th and Market, he gestures a few blocks east toward the Loews Hotel as one model; he dreams of performing this music in the Sofitel.

"There's an old hotel in downtown Cincinnati from the Deco period," Moon recalls. "Dark black, green-veined marble on the walls, ornate glass chandeliers, gold mirrors, just decked out. I sat in there and thought, Man, why isn't there a band here?'"

As the music started to coalesce, Moon penned a mission statement for its eventual realization. "I didn't want it to be a 'jazz record' as per the Wynton definition," he says. "I wanted it to be something that could sneak up on you. I had this idea of playing for lounges, writing for people who were not paying attention. If you start from ignorability, what happens?"

Guitarist Kevin Hanson, who produced and performs on the CD, recalls the first time Moon broached this lounge concept during the mixing process. "I thought he was kidding," Hanson laughs. "It seemed like a really self-deprecating, self-effacing name that played up the tendency that somebody who didn't have too keen of an ear would be reminded of a Dave Koz record or something."

Hanson first encountered Moon in his journalist's guise in the early '90s, shortly after the guitarist's then-band, Huffamoose, was signed to Interscope Records. Their next meeting followed the release of what would turn out to be Huffamoose's last album, which Moon had savagely panned in a review. "He and our lead singer got into a snotty little thing over it," Hanson recalls, quickly adding, "It ended with everybody laughing."

Still, Moon was enough of a fan that he called on Hanson to lend an ear to the rough demos of his new music. "They were demoed out with cheesy Yamaha DX7 synthesizers and very generic Latin loops," Hanson says, "but the flow of the tunes and their compositional architecture was really attractive to me."

Hanson encouraged Moon to take the songs into the studio, and even offered the services of the rhythm section from his current band, The Fractals: keyboardist Mike Frank and ex-Huffamoose drummer Erik Johnson and bassist Jim Stager. The band was then fleshed out with percussionist Josh Robinson, and vibraphonist Behn Gillece.

"We workshopped the tunes," Moon says, "and people were not necessarily like, 'Oh my god, this is great music,' but there was enough curiosity on their part that it wasn't like they were slumming and working with somebody who didn't have anything to offer. To bring music into this overcrowded world that's already choking with music is an act of some arrogance. There's no way for this not to sound self-serving, but if we had come out at the other end and didn't have anything that felt like it was in some way unique, I probably wouldn't have shared it. There's not a lot of demand for this kind of record, I'm not expecting that it's going to sell a lot, but it's kind of interesting that someone who wrote about music this long has an aesthetic of his own."

That aesthetic was, in part, born of the countless hours spent under headphones over many years, an experience which teaches nothing if not an ability to listen. That receptivity, Moon feels, is key to the success of any musical endeavor, and one aspect that he feels confident in porting over from his critical role.

"I think [my experience as a critic] was a benefit in the simple, rudimentary sense of open-mindedness. The thing that we as writers need to have when we open the laptop at the beginning of the day, regardless of what the work is that we're addressing, is some spirit of receptivity to learn what world the music is in and how it functions in that world. As a much younger person, I played a lot of lame shows: dumb wedding gigs, worked on cruise ships, did a lot of D-level work. And as a musician you get to where you're jaundiced doing that kind of stuff. I use [pianist] Brad Mehldau as an example: You can always tell that no matter what the setting is and what he's working with as far as material, he is listening. He's completely in it and reacting to what's happening and helping to shape what's happening without using a sledgehammer to do it. He's a model for me."

SIDE B: Longtime Inquirer rock critic Tom Moon (right) sits in on an open jam at MilkBoy Coffee in Ardmore.

Whatever benefit Moon's critical instincts may have provided, Hanson insists that they never intruded into the recording process. "His life as a writer was right alongside, like an extra passenger in the car, but it was a silent passenger. It wasn't in any way a backseat driver that dictated the flow of the session or the songs. The music was always at the forefront, so nobody was ever trapped inside some sense of irony. And Tom is a really humble guy, so his ego didn't get in the way at all. There was a certain sense of adventure throughout the project."

Moon has embraced that adventure, looking at the process of recording, releasing and now performing to support the new CD as a serious musical endeavor but also as something of a research project.

"It was such an unbelievable learning experience," he says. "I'm not at the point of saying that everyone who writes about music should go through something like this, but I think it does sensitize you to how hard it is to bootstrap your own thing without the apparatus of a label to help you. Let's throw this out there in the spirit of starting a conversation about what it means to be a critic, what it means to do this kind of music in this country at this time when there's still enormous indifference to anything creative, and music is more ignorable than ever before. Instead of writing a zillion blogs about how fucked up it is to be a musician in America today, why not see what it is?"

There will be a blog, however, through which Moon plans to engage in that discussion, recount his experiences, and even share his demos, which he finds embarrassingly simplistic, and eventual reviews — positive or negative. Still, when the band celebrates the album's release on Jan. 30, Moon will be there as a tenor saxophonist, not as an undercover reporter.

"Part of the challenge for me is turning off all my usual editorial filters," he says. "I spent a lot of time thinking about the tone of the instrument, how to get something that had Coltrane and Wayne in it, which I can't escape as a student of jazz, but then had something of its own backbone. I'm not sure it's there, but that's what I'm trying for. But the main thing is to not care about fucking up. As a critic you would say, 'Artist X is trying for this — does he get it or not?' As a player you're trying for this, and you can't care anymore after that. I know what the horizon is, what the goal is, but you'd drive yourself crazy worrying too much about whether you get there."

(editorial@citypaper.net)

Moon Hotel Lounge Project CD release show, Sun., Jan. 30, 8 and 10 p.m., $5, L'Etage, 624 S. Sixth St., 215-592-0656, creperie-beaumonde.com, intotheojala.com.