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Sidewalk Dances: 14 Moondog Pieces
Joanna MacGregor
Andy Sheppard
Britten Sinfonia
On her recent tours with the
Britten Sinfonia, the charismatic pianist Joanna MacGregor has been coupling
Bach with her arrangements of music by American street composer Moondog,
who graduated from an Arapaho Indian reservation to the sidewalks of Manhattan.
This collection of 14 pieces combines Monodog's Native Indian rhythms,
and meticulous obsession with counterpoint and canon, with MacGregor's
natural high spirits to create innovative foot-tappers. A real treat from
one of the most original musicians at work in this country.
The Observer
Purism in music is
out; eclecticism is in. But no one does it better, or with more genuine
enthusiasm, than Joanna MacGregor, says Phil Johnson - she's a pianist
as thrilling with Bach as with Moondog
Everyone has heard the music of Louis Hardin (1916-1999), the blind American
composer known as Moondog. A few years ago, a piece he wrote in the Fifties
to mark the death of his friend Charlie Parker was remixed by the cult
DJ Mr Scruff. All wobbly-legged rhythms, parping saxophones and weird,
clunky, counterpoint, the catchy tune became oddly ubiquitous, appropriated
as background music for numerous commercials and, as Mr Scruff told me
rather ruefully, "shite decorating programmes on daytime TV".
Now, you can hear a more faithful
version of the original "Bird's Lament" on a marvellous new
album by the pianist and conductor Joanna MacGregor. Moondog - Sidewalk
Dances, presents MacGregor's re-arrangements of 14 pieces for the chamber
orchestra of Britten Sinfonia, plus guest soloists including the jazz
saxophonist Andy Sheppard. Evolving out of an earlier tour which paired
Moondog with Bach's Art of Fugue, the album, which incorporates a number
of additional compositions, represents, says MacGregor, "a labour
of love".
On a superficial level, Moondog
and MacGregor make strange bedfellows. Moondog - who lost his sight in
a teenage accident with dynamite - slept rough on the streets of New York
City and liked to dress up as a Viking. Joanna MacGregor, whose striking
hairstyle could possibly be read as an emblematic equivalent to Moondog's
Viking helmet, lives alone (indoors) in Brighton when she's not travelling
the world as a concert pianist, ambassador for British music and Artistic
Director of Bath International Music Festival. But their coming together
embodies a very personal paradox that gets to the heart of MacGregor's
deep-rooted obsessions in music. If Moondog was an outsider-artist who
couldn't get into the academy, MacGregor is an insider forever trying
to break out. Although, given her musical training (New Hall, Cambridge;
the Royal Academy of Music; Van Cliburn Piano Institute, Texas), she's
not nearly as "inside" as you might think.
"I came to Moondog's music
really quite late, I had no secret 'in' on him," MacGregor told me
last Sunday, just before she went on stage at The Forum in Norwich, where
she and Andy Sheppard were performing their acclaimed suite of spirituals,
Deep River. "It was Elvis Costello's Meltdown at the South Bank in
1995, and I saw Moondog advertised. I went on my own, sat at the back
of the QEH, for what was possibly his last performance. Then the experience
marinated for a while. I was struck by him as a person, this rather ferocious
appearance coupled with really gleeful humour. He became a figure who
made more and more sense over the years. The thing that really did it
for me was putting on the Art of Fugue: I suddenly said "Moondog!"
On her 1996 recording Counterpoint,
MacGregor had already paired Art of Fugue with pieces by Conlon Nancarrow,
another important American "outsider" with a liking for madly
syncopated rhythms. "From Charles Ives onwards, all of these American
artists connected with me in a visceral way," she says. "I think
when you do get into any artist's life there's always going to be an element
of outsider-dom, at least at the extreme end. With Moondog, there's also
the whole sociological impact of a composer who lived on the streets,
who was blind and consistently resistant to an ordered life of any type.
I'm not like that, but I'm aware that you're always trying to protect
something in yourself. And then I found out that Moondog's father was
a preacher. I wasn't remotely surprised. All of these people have father-figures
they're trying to get away from." Moondog's father used to take his
son on visits to Native American reservations when he was a boy. Those
wobbly-legged rhythms derive partly from attempts to imitate the gait
of ritual dancers, and partly from the counterpoint of Bach.
Joanna MacGregor's father was
a preacher too, a Seventh Day Adventist. "I was brought up in a black
church in north London" she says. "My father used to go preaching
and I would go with him, playing the organ. He still leads Bible classes.
You accept anything when you're a child, especially as I didn't go to
school. Once I did go [at 11 she entered South Hampstead High School],
I started to lead a dual or multiple identity, but it's given me an enormous
amount, this background, and been a huge influence on my music. I experienced
this fantastically living version of the Bible; I was a little girl who
knew all about the Bible. Then as an adult I discovered that this same
experience had happened to a lot of people in American music, the tension
between sacred and secular."
The question of how far MacGregor,
who's 47, has retained a sense of spirituality is, for her, a vexed one.
"It's not so obvious, and difficult to talk about," she says.
"I've never been one for rejecting other people's sincerely-held
religious beliefs. It's also a very emotional thing. I'm interested in
why people play the way they do, the emotional impulses behind the playing,
and I'm very interested in raw artists, like Charles Mingus. They seem
to get in touch with what music is trying to say."
At the same time as she was
learning the Bible, MacGregor was being taught the piano by her mother,
who had studied at the Royal Academy. "She taught me very freely
and I grew up improvising," she says. "We studied 'Take Five'
next to Bach and that never went away in my psyche. It was also a lifeline
as I wasn't going to be able to survive in that (classical) world psychologically,
all that needing-approbation thing. I've always been very bloody-minded,
about doing the right thing, or looking the right way. People don't understand
how someone could have the technique to play the Goldberg Variations and
yet not come out of that world; it flies in the face of everything they
believe.
"Classical musicians are
taught very young to have this overdeveloped, even facile technique, and
they aren't allowed to express themselves. The best players are those
who don't allow technique to swamp them."
Virtuosity is something that
MacGregor is ambivalent about. "For me it's a bit like being born
with blue eyes, or having perfect pitch, which I don't care about much
either." If MacGregor talks so unselfconsciously about her art, it's
probably because the art and the life are indivisible. She could be a
female counterpart to the late James Brown, and the hardest working woman
in showbusiness. Last Sunday she was in Norfolk; today she's in Havana,
having played several concerts in Bilbao and Seville in between. From
Cuba she returns to Britain for a month of concerts and masterclasses
(she's a Professor at Liverpool Hope University) and the press launch
of the Bath Festival, before leaving for Moscow, where she's been invited
to play Messiaen at the Kremlin. Then there's a tour of Brazil, Uruguay
and Argentina with the Britten Sinfonia. When she comes back, it's the
start of two frenetic weeks at Bath.
So what makes Joanna run? "It
sounds like I've got a strategy, which I haven't," she says. "I
never had a game-plan. I'm personal in my choices and I've allowed myself
to meander a bit, but I'm emotionally connected to everything I've done,
I never just accepted a job offer. The industry hasn't got a way of handling
someone like that, they want you stay on one track. My agents, who are
great, are always getting requests for repertoire that I'm no longer playing.
I'm looking for something. It's restlessness. But at home I'm a real nester.
I get in, light a fire, listen to music, open some wine, have a day dream."
Unusually for a musician, MacGregor
is also genuinely interested in other people's music. When she's not playing
herself, she goes to concerts and hangs out afterwards, drinking in the
bar. She'll take off on long trips, driving across the Mississippi Delta,
say, and checking out the blues-shacks, or getting Wynton Marsalis to
take her round the clubs of New Orleans. These enthusiasms, and the way
her concert programmes cross the boundaries so easily, mixing the Goldberg
Variations with Skip James and Astor Piazzolla, make her a perfect choice
as Artistic Director of Bath.
One can even imagine Joanna
MacGregor as a kind of benign version of Cliff Richard in the film Summer
Holiday, taking a big red double- decker full of music lovers on a mystery
tour of fantastically exotic destinations, sneaking past the Ruritanian
border-guards of the boring, grey countries (Symphonia? Crossoverland?)
in search of new, undiscovered territory.
Of course, from the non-classical
side of the fence, none of this ecumenical, hands-across-the-genres, stuff
would mean anything unless MacGregor had the chops to back it up. One
thinks back in horror to the aesthetic crime of Daniel Barenboim performing
Duke Ellington, his high-arched hands hitting the right notes but robbing
the music of any lightness, grace or wit. MacGregor, by contrast, plays
a heavy-rolling New Orleans piano rag as if to the Storyville manner born.
At Norwich last Sunday, her fingers flew across the keys like the proverbial
fish a-jumpin', left-hand ostinato rumbling away until you feared the
piano was about to explode from within. And it didn't sound forced, or
hackneyed, or condescending. It sounded great.
Independent on Sunday
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