Ghost Train Orchestra: The Music of Moondog
Special Guests
Noon David Byrne, Sam Amidon, Joan As Police Woman, and Karen Mantler will be performing as special guests on the 12:00 show with Ghost Train Orchestra at the Tennessee Theater in their chamber ensemble format reimagining the music of Louis Hardin aka Moondog.
1pm Joan as Police Woman, Karen Mantler, and Sam Amidon will also be performing with the full 15-piece Ghost Train Orchestra on the 1:30pm show reimagining the music of Moondog in orchestral splendor.
The Ghost Train Orchestra brings music that was teetering on historical oblivion back to the present, adding new color and life. Two decades ago, Brian Carpenter, the leader of the pan-American dazzlers Beat Circus, accepted a commission to arrange tunes that were nearly a century old for a historic theater’s birthday. Since turning that idea into the Ghost Train Orchestra, Carpenter and a big band that includes the likes of percussionist David Cossin, bassist Chris Lightcap, and violinist Sara Caswell have recorded multiple volumes of hot jazz and chamber curiosities stretching from the ’20s to the ’40s. But their breakthrough recording came when sound engineer Bryce Goggin suggested to Carpenter that Ghost Train should give the Viking of Sixth Avenue a look—that is, that they should record Moondog.
Moondog was long a curiosity of Manhattan, a blind and bearded man who wielded a spear and sported a horned helmet. He was a local landmark. He was also a deeply influential composer, with fans that stretched from Charlie Parker to Laurie Anderson, from Elvis Costello to loads of indie rock bands. A roommate to Philip Glass, he had a profound impact on the development of American minimalism. Moondog’s music moved from percussion pieces for instruments he invented himself to immersive instrumentals that played with time and timbre to quixotic tunes that expressed some playful notion. On 2023’s Songs & Symphoniques—with help from an all-star cast that included the likes of Jarvis Cocker, Rufus Wainwright, and Petra Haden—Ghost Train offered a survey of his brilliance. The orchestra will revisit Moondog’s music at Big Ears 2026, with special guests in tow.