Dustin Laurenzi: Snaketime: The Music of Moondog

The blind composer Moondog was born Louis Thomas Hardin in 1916 and died in 1999 after spending much of his life selling music and serenely inhabiting the sidewalks of Midtown Manhattan with bearded, cloaked and Viking-horned gravitas. Chicago saxophonist Dustin Laurenzi more than does the idiosyncratic genius justice on Snaketime: The Music of Moondog (Feeding Tube). A serpentine octet teases out the magisterial mystery of Moondog’s distinctively canonical music. Laurenzi throws himself into an ecstatic extended solo on “Lament I (Bird’s Lament),” a peak-pleasure highlight of an album that pulsates with a nearly forgotten eccentric’s uniquely beautiful musical vision.