Tom Moon - THE MATRIX

I RECOMMEND

Tom Moon

RECOMMENDS 0 people/categories

↳ outgoing recommendations by the matrix

Who I Am & Where I Live:

Name: Tom Moon
City: Philadelphia, PA
Country: United States

My Life

Biographical: When award-winning music journalist Tom Moon began sharing his original music in 2011, he found himself routinely grilled by his peers about what some saw as his unusual move – transitioning from writing about art to creating it.

“I would try to point out that what I was doing wasn’t an ethical conflict of interest,” Moon says of the interviews he did to spread the word about Into The Ojala, from his group Moon Hotel Lounge Project. “I’d rattle off a list of people who thrived doing both pursuits – the composer Virgil Thomson, Talking Heads frontman David Byrne, jazz pianist Keith Jarrett and many others.” During one of the more heated exchanges, Moon recalls, he went back to a transcript of a 2004 interview he did with Stephen Merritt, the singer, songwriter and leader of The Magnetic Fields, who was writing criticism at the time.

“Stephen had clearly thought about this, both from the ethical and aesthetic perspectives,” recalls Moon, a regular contributor to NPR’s All Things Considered and the author of the New York Times bestseller 1000 Recordings To Hear Before You Die.

“He sensed that he had a responsibility to share whatever specialized knowledge he’d picked up, and wanted to use that knowledge to advocate for great work. Then he said something that stuck with me: “That wall between church and state, between the press and the people the press covers? The Internet has pretty much shattered it. If, as a journalist, you decide to refrain from sharing your original music or anything else you make, recognize that you are following your own code. Nobody cares what side you are on.”

Moon credits Merritt with helping to clarify his thinking on the church/state divide, which has eroded further in the years since he spoke those words. A saxophonist and composer, Moon has Merritt’s quote at the ready as he prepares to share Blue Night, the debut from his group Ensemble Novo. The album offers breezy, inviting interpretations of classic Brazilian samba and bossa nova, as well as several similarly-spirited Moon originals. To be released July 16 on CD and via all music download sites, the album marks the next step in Moon’s unlikely return to music-making.

Moon studied music at the University of Miami, and while living in South Florida amassed an enviable resume – performing in pit orchestras behind Tony Bennett, Eddie Fisher and others, working in salsa bands, entertaining on cruise ships, and touring for a year with the Maynard Ferguson Orchestra. He served as music critic at the Philadelphia Inquirer from 1988 until 2004, a job that prevented him from pursuing his own music.

Moon returned to active music-making in 2010, after the publication of 1000 Recordings. He started out at low-key jam sessions, where he was regarded as something of a curiosity: “Most of the players were in college or had just graduated,” the award-winning journalist recalls, “and they’d look at me and go “Who’s that greybeard? But they turned out to be incredibly open-minded. I’d been away from music for a long time, and those guys were incredibly patient with me. I was lucky to be welcomed like that –we developed a rich musical rapport very quickly.”

Since then, Moon has become part of a thriving collective working to improve the environment for creative music in the city. He’s composed music for several different groups – his originals are featured on Into the Ojala, the 2011 release by Moon Hotel Lounge Project. The album drew critical raves: USA Today described it as a “seductive spell, jazzy grooves rooted in a bygone era of nightlife sophistication.” Other Moon-led groups appear regularly in Philadelphia music spots – including Time Restaurant, Triumph Brewery, L’Etage, World Café Live and Milkboy Philly where he hosts the weekly Jazz Casual on Tuesday nights.

The roots of Ensemble Novo can be traced to one of Moon’s early jam-session sojourns. “I was deeply immersed in Brazil because I’d just finished a piece on the great singer Elis Regina for NPR,” Moon recalls. “And so at this session I suggested we play Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “How Insensitive.” The guitar player floored me – he knew every rhythm and voicing from the original, really understood the tune in a deep way. We connected instantly.” The guitarist, Ryan McNeely, was in his last semester in the music school at Temple University, and had spent much of his college years studying Brazilian music. He and Moon began playing regularly, and pretty soon – after McNeely returned from his first visit to Brazil – Ensemble Novo was up and running. The group also features percussionist Jim Hamilton, a founding member of the popular Philly drum corps Alo Brazil, and vibraphonist Behn Gillece.

Moon says his goal for Ensemble Novo is simple. “I just want to share these endlessly uplifting and accessible melodies. People have this perception of Brazilian music as a little bit dentist-officey, and sure, it can be that, but it’s also incredibly sensual, and powered by these beautiful alternating currents of joy and sorrow. It’s the opposite of music that demands attention – just a nice low-key elixir that can sneak up on you.”

My Media

Website: http://www.ensemblenovo.com
Twitter: moonjawn
Buy My Music: http://ensemblenovo.bandcamp.com/releases
Instagram: moonjawn
Book Purchases: http://www.amazon.com/Tom-Moon/e/B001JSJLCK/
YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIU49vAOutye8ns_Qk5g6hg

Listen on Spotify

Spotify: http://open.spotify.com/album/2iJIVBEYdmqe7fAME4u3fW
Spotify 2: http://open.spotify.com/album/4AJhdZFH4o5OkL2SAS7fj8
Spotify 3: http://open.spotify.com/album/3hbj0PnszWLGVXVKt8RwZl

Contact Information

Email: moontom@aol.com

Clips

Look To the Sky
By Tom Moon

17 views

This is a matrix navigable from artist to artist following recommendations-as-guideposts. It's based in the concept behind small world (so-called "six degrees of separation") networks...meaning that everybody inside the matrix is somehow findable/reachable from everybody else in a limited number of steps. And this heralds — for the first time since mankind began blowing through bone flutes some 30,000 years ago — the potential for a completely open and totally accessible artistic universe!

THE MATRIX IS MUSICIAN / ARTIST-IN-GENERAL RECOMMENDATIONS BY THE MOST POWERFUL, SOPHISTICATED & SUBTLE SOFTWARE YET DEVISED:

⇒ the collective human mind

IT IS BASED IN BAHIA, GROUND ZERO FOR BRAZIL'S SUN-CARONA VIBRANT AFRO-BRAZILIAN CULTURE

⇒ ...rooted in a region called the Recôncavo, analogous in Brazil to the Mississippi Delta in the United States.

THE MATRIX REACHES FROM BRAZIL TO CUBA TO BROOKLYN TO BERLIN TO TOKYO TO TIMBUKTU

⇒ To wherever people want to take it...

IT IS THE NEXT-STEP EVOLUTION OF A SPECIALTY RECORD SHOP

⇒ ...opened in Salvador to showcase magisterial musicians almost completely unknown to the world...many of them living in poverty or close to it and unable to avail themselves of traditional (and costly) means of publicizing.

PRE-BRAZIL — IN NEW YORK CITY — WE "RESCUED" UNPAID ROYALTIES FOR PERFORMERS & COMPOSERS INCLUDING:

⇒ Aretha Franklin, Barbra Streisand, Led Zeppelin, Philip Glass, Mongo Santamaria, Airto Moreira, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Jim Hall, Taj Mahal, Robb Royer of Bread, Speedo & the Cadillacs, and many more! With Speedo's (Earl Carroll) amazing story (kid singing on the streetcorners of Harlem to doo-wop fame to working as a beloved school janitor) I learned — as Quincy Jones figured out decades before me — that greatness and fame are completely independent. I'd see that the wave had been repeated here in Brazil with a man by the name of Raimundo Sodré, who'd gone from zero to national fame and back to zero.

IN LIGHT OF ALL THE ABOVE I BUILT A (THE WORLD'S FIRST EVER!) SMALL WORLD CURATION NETWORK...

⇒ A wave of a cyberwand opening pathways allowing ANY ARTIST — FAMOUS OR NOT — in ANY FIELD — in ANY PLACE in the world — to potentially be reached by ANYBODY from ANYWHERE.

BY WHAT WIZARDRY?

⇒ We've all heard of six degrees of separation, more properly called a small world network. Within six or so steps we can move through a chain of people knowing other people to just about anybody on the planet.

SIMPLY CHANGE "KNOW" TO "RECOMMEND"

⇒ In exactly the same way, step by step we can move through chains of ARTISTS CURATING ARTISTS to to just about any artist on the planet.

LIKE THIS...

⇒ From Quincy Jones we access one of his protégés, stellar young Cuban pianist Alfredo Rodriguez. From Alfredo Rodriguez we access a fabulous multinstrumentalist Alfredo plays with, Munir Hossn. Two more steps and we've reached the above-mentioned Raimundo Sodré, formerly virtually unreachable in Bahia...

Raimundo Sodré Now

Dengo

Add to my Playlist

Sina de Cantador - Raimundo Sodré (6,524 plays)
Add to my Playlist

Magnetismo - Raimundo Sodré (6,229 plays)
Add to my Playlist

Sacando a Cana - Raimundo Sodré (5,877 plays)
Add to my Playlist

Mêrêrê - Raimundo Sodré (5,402 plays)
Add to my Playlist

A Massa - Raimundo Sodré (4,958 plays)
Add to my Playlist

Jardim do Amor - Raimundo Sodré (4,631 plays)
Add to my Playlist

Debaixo do Céu - Raimundo Sodré (4,112 plays)
Add to my Playlist

Desejo de Amar - Raimundo Sodré (3,823 plays)
Add to my Playlist

Oração pra Yá Oxum - Raimundo Sodré (3,701 plays)
Add to my Playlist

Yá África - Raimundo Sodré (3,472 plays)
Add to my Playlist

Meu Rio, Cadê o Papel - Raimundo Sodré (3,148 plays)
Add to my Playlist

Casa de Trois - Raimundo Sodré (2,868 plays)
Add to my Playlist

Mulher é Laço que Prende o Coração do Va... (2,531 plays)

Share | Report | 57,276 plays | 9,564 views

DICTATED SILENCE

⇒ Sodré's meteoric major-label career was crushed by the Brazilian dictatorship years ago and he was forced to flee Brazil under threat of death...into a 19 year exile. He became almost impossible to find and hear, even after returning to Brazil.

MUSIC FALLS LIKE RAIN

⇒ But now lines of everbranching interlinked recommendations rise from Bahia to form a (small world) network rounding the planet like the arboreal canopy of a vast Amazonian rainforest. When the dictatorship ground Sodré into the dust, they unwittingly planted a seed.

FROM SODRÉ, A WORLDLINE TO SPLENDID BULE BULE (LEATHER HAT) ABOVE... AND TO OTHERS IN THE CLIP...

⇒ "The time has arrived for these people of color to show their worth ... I want to see Uncle Sam play tambourine so the whole world can samba!"

AND FROM BULE ON...

⇒ ...tendrils twining through urban centers and beautiful backwaters... through New York boroughs, Burkina Faso... County Clare... Cape Town...

THROUGH ARTISTS ACROSS THE BOARD

⇒ ...writers, journalists, photographers, painters, illustrators, architects, choreographers, filmmakers...

IS THE MATRIX AN ALTERNATE REALITY?

⇒ Only if your reality has been defined by corporate mass media. The original meaning of "matrix" is "source", from "mater", Latin for "mother". We're real mothers for ya!

DOES THE MATRIX WATCH YOU?

⇒ Zero surreptitious tracking, data mining and data brokerage per Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, et al.