Music of the maverick Moondog in a genre-spanning star cast
"Songs and Symphoniques" features brilliant reinterpretations of the music of Louis Thomas Hardin, better known as Moondog. The blind musician, poet and composer lived on the streets of Manhattan from the 1950s to the 1970s as the "Viking of Sixth Avenue" before disappearing without a trace and resurfacing in the distant Ruhr region in the late 1970s. His insistently rhythmic, strictly contrapuntal music inspired Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Conceived as a collaboration between the Brooklyn-based Ghost Train Orchestra and the legendary Kronos Quartet, the album quickly expanded to include numerous exquisite voices of pop and jazz music, such as Marissa Nadler, Joan Wasser (Joan As Police Woman), Jarvis Cocker (Pulp), Rufus Wainwright and Petra Haden.