You might know award-winning critic/journalist Tom Moon from his bestselling book 1,000 Recordings To Hear Before You Die, his contributions to NPR’s All Things Considered or his freelance work in the likes of Rolling Stone, GQ, Blender, Spin and Vibe, but around the MAGNET office, when we think of Moon, we think of the nearly two decades he spent as the music critic of our hometown newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer. When you regularly read a writer’s work for that long, you feel like you really get a sense of who someone is, so we were shocked to find out that Moon is also a musician who just made an album. Into The Ojalá (Frosty Cordial) is credited to Moon Hotel Lounge Project and came out earlier this month. MHLP is an impressive, instrumental, jazz/lounge/Latin-leaning project featuring Moon and six local musicians playing nine Moon-penned tunes as well as a cover of gospel standard “Rock Of Ages.” We are excited to have Moon guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our new Q&A with him.
Moon: Speaking of crutches, there is one that’s actually helped accelerate my fitful return to music: The Real Book application for the iPhone. In the physical world, the Real Book is a massive two-inch-thick tome containing the melodies and chord sequences for many jazz standards and cocktail-hour classics. Its creators have taken 900 tunes and put them into an easily searchable database; they eliminated the notation of the melody and instead present the chords of each tune on a single, easy-to-read screen. But that’s not all: Many of the tunes have a corresponding “Music Minus One” style audio track that offers solid, if rudimentary, piano bass and drums accompaniment. A tempo and key adjustment makes it possible to workshop the tunes to suit the players’ skill level. If only they’d had something like this when I was learning the tunes the first time around …
Video after the jump.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_8nnwh3_2Y
