By Mike Faloon | Photos by Michael Bogdanffy-Kriegh / Studio MBK
Photos by Michael Bogdanffy-Kriegh
“You all didn’t come here to hear stories. You came to hear music.” Cooper-Moore pauses his monologue and proposes getting back to songs.
Someone calls out, “It’s all music.”
Moore grins. That’s a reaction he can work with, the sign of an audience into tunes and tales in equal measure.
Outside it is another miserable night. The snow banks inch ever higher. The icy street corners grow more perilous. I visited family in Syracuse last weekend. I went looking for driveway salt because I’ve been unable to find any down this way. When I finally tracked down a supply I was told it was the last stash in town and there was a strict one-bag per customer policy. What kind of long, lousy winter are we experiencing when Syracuse—the Salt City, perennial snow belt kings—is running out of salt?
Music might not be enough tonight. Thankfully this installment of the Monday night jazz series at Quinn’s—Cooper-Moore and Patrick Brennan—is more than music.
Brennan opens the night blazing away on his alto sax. His sound isn’t easy to file. It’s not totally free, unhinged, but what it’s tethered to is hard to say. It’s not exactly melodic either. His sound is puzzling and inviting. He could hold an audience unaccompanied.
Which makes this show all the better. Brennan is accompanied. By another performer who can hold an audience on his own, Cooper-Moore, the mapcap maker and player of instruments that are at once familiar and unusual.
Cooper-Moore says his drum-free drum set is comprised of pre-tuned drum heads, made by Remo back in the ‘80s. Drummers have a rap for being unable and/or unwilling to keep their drums in tune. Remo smelled opportunity. Just snap the pre-tuned drum heads into place, and you’re good to go. It’s like slicing the top off a muffin, though the pre-tuneds (sounds like Philip K. Dick, right?) didn’t catch on. Years later Moore knows where to look when his stockpile dips, mostly music stores looking to clear out dusty inventory or on-line.
This is Moore’s approach to everything: craft an instrument that’s as compelling to see as it is hear and honor that instrument with a worthy narrative.
That applies to his fretless banjo, whose circular body was cut from a closet door. The perimeter is paper mâché and instant coffee grounds (for color) sealed with floor wax. The sight of Moore’s banjo reminds me of all the Pete Seeger posters I’ve seen in Beacon storefronts. It’s the first time I’ve been in town since Seeger passed. Like Seeger, Cooper-Moore is a globe trotting teacher as much as he is a performer. Leading teacher workshops in Tupelo, Mississippi. Helping kids in Mexico City write an opera. Working with teen rappers in the suburbs of Paris. Or maybe it was rap in Mexico and opera in France. The details come fast and furious and I’m don’t catch everything in the flurry.
The diddley bow? A single string and a long board, five or six feet long. It can be plucked or bowed or played with sticks. It’s home to the rural south, “regarded as a kids’ instrument,” says Moore, “it was first mentioned by Pythagoras…It’s all about the one.”
And the handmade harp? Moore was living in Virginia in the mid-‘70s. He took a trip to DC and saw a Brazilian man playing a Paraguayan harp. He sought out such an instrument only to find it cost $8,000. Cut to Moore at home, gardening. He breaks a hoe and places the broken handle by his bedside. “Hoe handle, hoe handle, what will you be?” he calls out. Four hours of labor and eight bucks later he’s fashioned the “horizontal hoe handle harp,” complete with fishing line strings. Where does the story end and the fable begin? I’m confident no one is lingering on such questions. We’re just grateful talent of this caliber is upstate on a night like this.
Looking past the stage and through the windows streaked with condensation I see the piles of snow. It reminds me Cicely, Alaska the small fictional town from the old CBS series Northern Exposure. Despite living in remote Alaska the cast somehow found itself visited by strangers of all stripes week after week. (My favorite being Ed Chigliaks’ on-going correspondence with the likes of Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen.) Beacon is hardly Alaska—recent appearances to the contrary—but I’m still struck by the small-town-to-big-talent ratio.
The crowd is slower to assemble tonight—probably a function of the cold—but no less enthralled. One of my favorite sights, just before the end of the first set, is the row of motionless heads at the counter, everyone transfixed, relishing a rare mix of that-sounds-so-cool-and-how-are-they-doing-that? The applause breaks are tempered a bit, but I attribute that to mild collective confusion, not sure whether the latest installment of beautiful madness is pausing or ending.
The night’s best moments come when Brennan’s and Moore’s sounds are indistinguishable from each other. It happens numerous times. Here’s one that stays with me: Brennan goes high in the register but lays off the volume while Moore bows the high end of the diddley bow; the two sounds melting together. Wish I could throw some of that on my driveway.
Brennan and Moore hold court long after the show is over, breaking down and packing up as people trickle out. The wingnuts twirl and cases are carefully clasped. They pack their tent for the next show.
