Browse by Artist: MOONDOC/WILLIAM PARKER, JEMEEL

Artist:	MOONDOC/WILLIAM PARKER, JEMEEL
Title:	New World Pygmies
Label:	EREMITE
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.50
Catalog #:	MTE 020CD

"Moondoc pulls out all the stops on this album; it's the most complete documentation of his instrumental prowess on record. From the sustained melodic invention of the title track, to the sound-color-texture manipulations of 'Huey Sees A Rainbow" to the gut-wrenching interpretation of "Another Angel Goes Home', Parker's tribute to the late Denis Charles, Moondoc is at the top of his game. Listening to him on the title track as he carefully picks his notes, threading his way in crazy zigzag lines that avoid cliche at every turn, I thought of Thelonious Monk -- not his style but his spirit. The proud insistence on the idiosyncratic, the way he favors deliberate rough edges over polish and 'technique', the unsentimental rigor of his ballads, and the sheer emotional honesty of his playing -- these are Moondoc's virtues just as surely as they were Monk's and they make Moondoc's music unlike anyone else's working in the free jazz idiom. Oh, you can hear echoes of Jimmy Lyons' merciless intellect, Ornette Coleman's vulnerability, and Jackie McLean's sharp intonation and economy. But they are filtered through Moondoc's own experience, his own heart and mind. And when history fuses with experience in the creative act, it's only the individual voice you hear in the heat of the moment that counts. What you hear is pure Moondoc. Writers and critics will have run out of superlatives long before William Parker has run out of ideas on his instrument. His creativity is boundless, he has a feel for time as distinctive as his own heartbeat, and he can play any role the music calls for." ?Ed Hazell, liner notes

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