Private Astronomy Reviewed

Ah-bodio-doh nostalgia music was a small but sometimes enjoyable element in the music amalgam of the 60s. I am not talking corny stuff here. The Beatles to a great extent and Rolling Stones to a lesser extent picked up on this. Ahead of them but with a still more transcendent take was the Jim Kweskin Jugband of Boston. Blues folk and ragtime and some vaudeville were part of the Jugband mix.

A key member of that group was Geoff Muldar. Who returns in 2003 with a nostalgic view on Bix Beiderbecke. In using the term nostalgia here I seek to imply a wistful yearning for a thing pretty much unrecoverable. The musical world he surveys was really quite brief.

He hasn’t been too much on the scene for while but this pivotal figure in the Jim Kweskin Jug Band comes back with not blues - one of his fortes, but, well you could call it Whiteman’s [Paul’s] jazz. Iowan Beiderbecke played with Whiteman, and caught his blues from the jazz men on the riverboats of Davenport in the ‘20s. But better to call it out as Muldar does in his notes.

“...Bix’s heart and mind were rapt in anew, “moderjnistic” jazz influenced in great part by the works of Debussy, Ravel and other impressionists. Dreamy sounds ... a vision of the future.”

In a lot of ways I think science fiction has run it’s course, which is evolved into a generally horrific view of the future. The future as a dream - maybe a good one - that is Bix Beiderbecke in In a Mist, In the Dark, Candlelights.

Muldar has expanded beyond these Beiderbecke compositions –he left but six of them, he was a damn the torpedoes drinker who was dead at 28 in 1931 – and included Whiteman-Bing Crosby numbers. Muldar’s rendition of Waiting at the end of the road put me in oddball tears on the Acelea Express from New York to Boston [listening though headphones to laptop in cyberpunken first class. [alt [org] version of that: End of the road made this old boy cry on train w young cyber people back to Boston in my laptop ears.]

The view of the cities has changed. The people, somewhat at least, too. The rails, same rails Bix rode, don’t change.

Now we’ve heard Geoff with Maria D’Amato Muldar in the Kweskin days. And we heard him a couple of years ago on John Hurt tribute album with his daughters, and we dont want to call him no Spongegolli but he does seem to know the sound he seeks from the gals [siren vixens on lemonade?] For appearing here, beside daughters noted is Ms. Marth Wainwright, who has that, I kid you not, Muldar sound! She sings solos, and with the Muldar Jr.s briefly forming trio on Bless you sister.

Anyway the saxes are classic. But jazz oriented. Bix’s was a path that did not become main jass stream but get picked up from time to time. Loudon Wainwright smithies a tune of note here. Let us now praise famous Ian Whitcomb on ukulele and [caped] musette on Bless You Sister, and New Black Eagle Butch Thompson at key times on piano.

Muldar in essay liner notes says he is the guy maybe first to put this to chamber ensemble treatment. He’s mostly right one might suppose. And he aint bragging. Without detractihng but with effort to give testimony to memory.... of Worcester's Jackie Byard .. I hope to pick up this narrative briefly and soon to remember Jackie Byard, who introduced me to In a Mist.

Last update: 4/4/2004; 8:46:52 PM.