VIKING OF SIXTH AVENUE

Louis Thomas Hardin, better known by his pen name, Moondog, was a blind street musician, poet, and denizen of New York City's streets during the mid-20th century. Noted for his outlandish Norse-inspired costumes and use of odd, homemade instrumentation, Moondog's idiosyncrasies sometimes served to overshadow his very real and important contributions to modern American music. THE VIKING OF 6TH AVENUE, a compilation spanning the composer's entire career, highlights Hardin's influence on modal-jazz forms, and his importance as a precursor to minimal, pattern-based composition of the '60s and '70s. The collection encompasses everything from full-scale orchestral pieces, like the swinging "Lament 1 'Bird's Lament'" (famously sampled by Mr. Scruff and subsequently used for a well-known car advertisement), to brief percussion interludes, as in the tribal Native American inflections of "Snaketime Rhythm." Other tracks provide candid, on-location snapshots of his infamous street performances, with various traffic sounds all discernable in the mix. These remarkable recordings underscore how Moondog's intimate contrapuntal rhythms contrasted with the hustle and bustle of the city, offering a poignant look at an outsider seemingly out of step with the modern world, but at one with the rhythms of the universe.