Moondog Vs. Parels Ensemble: The Same Strange Machinery
I have been listening back and forth between Moondog and Parels Ensemble, particularly Parels Ensemble’s Baroque Pearls and Joanna MacGregor’s Sidewalk Dances: Fourteen Moondog Pieces, and the similarity keeps catching me sideways. Not similarity in the ordinary sense—not simply that both use saxophones, percussion, repetition, or chamber instrumentation. There are moments on Baroque Pearls that almost sound like Moondog cover songs that somehow are not Moondog songs. They feel like alternate versions of music I already know, as if the same musical intelligence had been asked to produce another branch of itself.
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