Been There

by Tom Moon
WHYY-FM
October 20, 2002

Transcribed from the audio by Lindsay Moon

Marty Goldensohn: You're listening to Been There. Tom Moon joins us on a regular basis. He's the music critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer. One week we gave Tom an assignment to bring us recordings from one-of-a-kind artists. How did he decide who was one of a kind?

Tom Moon: You can use any kind of yardstick: The unusual voice the -- you know, a voice like Nina Simone, that's one of a kind. A voice like Macy Gray, the more recent R & B singer, that's one of a kind, you know. Or you can figure out people who with their talents, with their voices, ended up changing the whole direction of the way things were going. And certainly we see that a lot in jazz. Sort of the history of jazz as instrumental music anyway is people who had an idea about where they wanted to take music where it wasn't going, and they followed it and took it somewhere completely different.

The person I selected first in jazz was the guy I think who managed to change the course of things more than any other artist in the 20th century in any field and he's been compared a lot to Picasso and I think that's the right comparison and that's Miles Davis.

(Music up.)

Tom Moon: This is a whole environment. This is a whole different approach to improvisation as well. When there's only really two chord changes in a piece of music, you have to organize the way you solo on it completely differently, and the people Miles was playing with at the time -- that's John Coltrane on tenor sax, Julian Cannonball Adderley on alto sax, and specifically pianist Bill Evans -- really got inside this idea and figured out to sort of make it more tense and more exciting than the bebop music that had tons of chord changes.

Marty Goldensohn: And there was enormous restraint in this music.

Tom Moon: Yeah.

Marty Goldensohn: So you could see what they were doing, you had time to see how it was different.

Tom Moon: Right. It invites you into it. It's a story rather than a news bulletin.

Marty Goldensohn: You want to take us from "Kind of Blue" to actual "Blue"?

Tom Moon: Well, another one of a kind obviously is Joni Mitchell. She figured out, first of all, how to tell stories without telling the whole story. She was very elliptical and yet incredibly descriptive, and her lyrics are in my opinion poetry straight through you. They can be read and they evoke something different from what she evoked in the music.

(Music up: Excerpt from "Peoples' Parties".)

Marty Goldensohn: You're listening to Been There. Tom Moon joins us.

Tom Moon: She later on became a jazz singer really and she worked with many jazz musicians of great consequence including Wayne Shorter who's been a regular collaborator on all her studio work.

Marty Goldensohn: It's funny, because when she made that turn is when I realized that I was on some level that I was listening to jazz all along and not folk music.

Tom Moon: That's right. I mean that's what she was. I mean her melodies were all very much more intricate than the usual two-bar phrases that you heard from the great folk singers. And there's nothing wrong with that stuff, but what she did was she figured out much longer, extended melody lines that sort of fit the way her poetry worked, and sometimes those don't line up at the bar line right and they hang over and they move in odd directions but that to me is part of the magic of her work.

(Music up: Excerpt from live version of "Hejira".)

Marty Goldensohn: People can't follow her because people who try to do that music don't do it as well as her.

Tom Moon: Well, I don't know about that. I think what she taught people and this is a lesson that singer/ songwriters are still learning today is that it is possible to be a little bit literary, to be very much an explorer musically, and to still write songs that sometimes end up on the radio. I mean, "Free Man in Paris," any one of a number of her songs from the early '70s were legitimate hits. I mean they were radio fodder but they were much more than that.

Marty Goldensohn: Now we move on to the embarrassing part of the interview for me that shows my age. Because you said that you thought Beck had that kind of originality and really caused a great change in music and I think I saw him once on a PBS special. I never told my kids that. So fill me in on Beck.

(Music up.)

Tom Moon: Well, Beck is a child of hip-hop. He comes out of L.A. hip-hop. He understands that world. And what he's done over a course of amazing records that are very stylistically diverse is figured out the way to use the tools of hip-hop to make very interesting collage oriented pop music. Some of it is directly related to hip-hop and sort of comes out of it and celebrates the energy of hip-hop as this song from "Odelay" called "Where It's At" does and then some of it uses sort of the tape techniques and layering and sampling and the cut and paste of music from various sources to create sort of a fresh sonic tableau.

(Music up: Excerpt from "Where It's At".)

Tom Moon: The thing about him is that he's also made these records like the one we'll hear now which are much more experimental, less pop oriented but show him to be a real reverent scholar, somebody who understands music from Brazil, music from the old country and Western traditions.

Marty Goldensohn: You know which cut we're doing?vTom Moon: "Tropicalia."

Marty Goldensohn: "Tropicalia."

(Music up: Excerpt from "Tropicalia".)

Marty Goldensohn: He has one thing in common with Miles: Gentle, restrained.

Tom Moon: Yeah, he's not the kind of singer who's going to hit you over the head. He is subtle. He likes to sort of make you work a little bit to get you in.

Marty Goldensohn: What kind of a mind do you think a musician needs to have to be one of a kind? Do these artists we've talked about -- Miles Davis, Joni Mitchell, Beck -- have anything in common?

Tom Moon: None of them give a damn. I really think that that's the key thing: They don't care. They are more curious about what can be found than they are about preserving anything that they had. I mean, Miles was the classic example of that and probably the most defiant and most sort of heeding his own drummer personality that we've had in modern music.

Marty Goldensohn: They didn't give a damn about junking what they had, what do you mean?

Tom Moon: Well, they were not attached to repeating the same thing again and again and again. Joni made an enormous contribution early in her career and did not write the same kind of songs time after time. She experimented greatly.

Marty Goldensohn: Started out with "Clouds," 'we've looked at clouds from both sides now.'

Tom Moon: Yes.

Marty Goldensohn: And ends up with Hejira-like music.

Tom Moon: Right. And at each step along the way was not necessarily trying to get to some commercial place or to replicate the impact that she had the first few times around. I mean, she was just writing songs and was very much like not being judgmental about what they were and where they came from.

Miles, again as we said, he's like the key to that. He's the king of getting bored and moving on and not caring whether the audience follows. And Beck's done the same thing. I mean, he's made records that are, you know, huge left turns from the previous record. And, you know, some of them will work and some won't.

Marty Goldensohn: Well, we hear a lot about outsider art. Maybe these are outsider musicians.

Tom Moon: It seems weird to say that because they all certainly have had success, but in a way they are and they are an example to people who are sort of much more cautious about their careers, about what can be done when we're not cautious, when we're just more irreverent about it, we don't hold things so closely and need to have the validation of a huge audience.

Marty Goldensohn: Tom Moon is the music critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, drops in on us here at Been There Done That from time to time and we're always enriched for it. Thanks a lot.

Tom Moon: Oh, my pleasure. Thank you.

Marty Goldensohn: It's Been There. I'm Marty Goldensohn.