Chasing a Moon Dream

As this project concludes, a reminiscence of the beginning.

Flashback Music! Doodlee-doodlee-doodlee-doodlee

When you're finally releasing a project that took you years to create, it's always fascinating to look back to the beginning. Where did this idea come from? Did the notion slowly build toward an idea? Was it a sudden spark?

What I remember from the early days of Rearranged work is a lot of e-mails to myself. I always put "arrangers" in the subject line so it would be easy to assemble them into some sort of outline. Here's the first one I ever sent myself about this project.

Valentines day, 2017. As expected, it all started with Gil Evans's arrangement of "Moon Dreams" for the Miles Davis album Birth of the Cool.

Dreams of Moon Dreams

A month later at a nonfiction residency in upstate New York, I took an evening off writing The Lines Between Us to bring the other authors together for a night of music listening. Simple instructions: play us your favorite song, and tell us why you love it. I played “Moon Dreams.” Right here, guys: listen how one player climbs to a high note, and a couple other instruments follow it up as if the first player had just discovered some sort of buried treasure...

I did end up interviewing Van Dyke Parks. For my upcoming book, "The Arrangers." Ha. I didn't think to make this a podcast until two years later, when an old radio pal said, "You just turned a podcast into a book. This is music. Why don't you do a podcast?" A fine idea. I took it.

I never used the Parks interview. Because I was thinking "book," I didn't get good audio. (And because no one in L.A. was interested in a book event during my west coast tour--boooo--I never realized our plans for an in-person interview with good sound equipment.) There's audio, but it's a dictaphone recording Parks on speakerphone with me furiously typing in the background. Oh well.

Chasing Konitz

As for legendary alto saxophonist Lee Konitz, I booked a call with him and e-mailed one of my best pals and radio influences, Bruce Wallace, in September 2017, almost two years before The Lines Between Us was published:

I have a wisp of a notion about what I might try to work on after the book: arrangers in jazz and pop. Konitz is one of few (if any, I need to check) people who worked with Gil Evans and Miles on the Birth of the Cool sessions. I want to interview Konitz before...well...

Well...I did get him on the phone, but he was short. "Oh, that was all Gerry Mulligan." Huh. Could I come to New York and interview him? No, he said, but he'd chat if I caught him at a gig.

In March 2019, Hechinger Report sent me to Boston to do a story on employers who were abandoning bachelor's degree requirements to hire people based on their skills. Browsing listings for cool music to see at night, I discovered Lee Konitz would be on a panel at Berklee College of Music to talk about Lennie Tristano.

I went, took a seat with interview questions crinkling in my pocket, and someone came to the stage to say that, sadly, Lee Konitz was too ill to travel to Boston. A year later he was dead.

Castles Made of Sound

The next year, I interviewed Larry Hickok, author of Castles Made of Sound, a Gil Evans biography that I'd read in my mid-20s and really shaped my understanding of music. Larry was wonderful, full of knowledge and good stories about "Moon Dreams" and the rest of the Birth of the Cool sessions.

You can hear some of that interview on Tuesday, when Episode 1 of Rearranged, "Gil Evans: Listen to What's There," premieres. "Moon Dreams" is still my favorite piece of recorded music, seven years after I got the notion to build a book around it.

And for the record, ha, I did find a couple versions of "Moon Dreams" that didn't move me.

But guess what. After just a few listens, now they do.

Tune into Episode 1!

Before I forget, don’t miss the incredible Lee Konitz solo on Elvis Costello’s “Someone Took the Words Away.”

Ok. Thanks for reading. Episode 1 of the Rearranged podcast premieres on Tuesday. You can subscribe and hear the trailer on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thanks to Osiris Media for marketing and distribution.