The Artist as a Young(er) Man

Michael Moss is a bit of a polymath; he is a creative guy interested in many things. In his life he has become an accomplished musician, a jazz improvisor, a composer, a band leader, has accompanied world class dancers and renowned story tellers, became Secretary, Vice president, then President of a musician’s cooperative in New York City during the 1970s named Free Life Communication, led as President three loft-jazz music festivals in NYC then went on to become Artistic Director of Art Awareness, an upstate New York performing arts venue in Lexington, New York where he produced three seasons of Loft in the Sky Jazz Festival in the 1980s where he now has a second home.

In the ‘70s Moss began a collaborative group they called Four Rivers, aka the four rivers of paradise with Moss on such reeds as tenor and soprano saxophones, flute, wooden flutes from around the world which he picked on travels to India, Thailand, etc., cane flutes of various cultures which he played in non-traditional ways including an Indian snake charmer, the Thai Khean, pan pipes and so forth. Four Rivers served as a vehicle for compositional adventures into music of many lands and cultures and included besides Moss pianist Greg Kogan, bassist John Shea, and drummer/percussionist Mike Mahaffay, occasionally adding tabla player Badal Roy, percussionist Armen Halburian, percussionist/drummer Muruga, drummer Laurence Cook, violinist Wyldon King, Toni Marcus, and Bob Stern with whom he played and recorded under Moss’s independent record label Fourth Stream Records(https://wordpress.com/page/m2-theory.com/11).

On the way to composing for the traditional quartet and quintet, Michael Moss discovered the path less taken, that of the Renaissance Orchestra. Among the music theory books left him by his concert pianist father, H. Baron Moss, was a tome about a small orchestra, a four hundred year old small orchestra which has evolved through cultural history of western Europe. In it, the ranges, clefs, and writing concepts for this ensemble emerged. At the time, Moss wanted to use a larger number of musicians and to find alternate forms of composition that could adapt to experimental music of the 1960s and 1970s. The result—a group composed of a string quartet, rhythm section, and horn section he called Free Energy. To put it in context, Gunter Hampel formed his Galaxy Dream Band around that time, as did Sam Rivers put together a number of larger groups, one of which, Winds of Manhattan, Moss himself was asked to join.

The group took on the name Free Energy due to Moss’s approach to composition which he follows up to and including the present writing for the musicians in the group. He is inspired as much by the talent they imbue as by the particular musical format. Like Michelangelo who sculpted figures he intuitively perceived in the marble beneath his hands, allowing the figures to create themselves using Michelangelo as the medium that dissolved alchemically the dross that concealed them, Moss wrote and writes pieces that feature the musicians du jour. In this way he has met most of the top creative cats in NYC. Among his largest commissions of the ‘60s and ‘70s was a request to conduct a piece for a 100 piece orchestra—the JCOA or Jazz Composers Orchestra Association (which also distributed his LPs)—which appeared at New York University. He wrote another piece commissioned by WBAI-FM for a group he formed for the occasion that filled the entire studio at the station with cats in every corner, music conducted by Moss utilizing chordal, atonal, formal, and free and intuitive constituents.

Thus, Free Energy as a working group became Moss’s opportunity to explore an exceptionally wide tract of experimental territory. This music remains in Moss’s archives and will be performed if and when an opportunity and funding arises. Moss wants to revive the group to formally record the symphonies and symphonettes he composed for this Renaissance Orchestra, 

Following in the footsteps of the great saxophonist John Coltrane in addition to certain pop influences such as the Beatles, and rhythm and blues artists James Brown, Otis Redding, Otis Rush, Wilson Picket, and Little Richard, Moss decided to write modal musics with an accent on the blues.  Just as Coltrane found, modes freed up the improvisor to extend scalar patterns and multiply rhythm into “tals” of varying lengths.  The “tin tal” is a 4/4 beat but it is 16 beats long. In itself 16 beats become a measure. The best way to describe the music is “world beat” except Moss started this at least 15 years before the onset of world music. As always he was and still is ahead of his time. 

Moss wrote music reminiscent of different cultures in order to deeply explore cultural traditions without appropriating those cultures. This led him to learn musical scales of Turkey, Armenia, the Balkans, Greece, Israel, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, and the entire Mediterranean so as to get inside the music. As a result, he added instruments to the band such as the dumbeg (Halburian) for middle eastern and even Irish pieces and tabla (Roy). As a result, Moss’s music is an alchemical transformation of western and so-called non-traditional scales and meters from Japan to the US, the Mississippi delta blues to the Irish step gig, the 7/4 of Greek music, to the 8ths, 9ths, 10ths, 11ths, 13ths, 14ths, 15ths, and so forth of the Indian sub-continent. Moss then went on to explore the music of Senegal and djembe-influenced music of West Africa and started working with master kora and djembe musicians who have moved to the US to continue the evolution of improvised music.

In this way Four Rivers expressed the source of all life, healing, and perfection. Think of the alchemical properties of earth, air, fire and water. Numerology and Tarot consider the number four to be that of completion; the four-in-one—the number of unity according to C.G. Jung. Jung points out that humanity uses four psychological functions that correspond to each of these—the intuitive function–-fire, the intellectual or thinking function—air, the feeling function—water, and the sensation function—earth. Astrology further expands these functions. You may find references to four-ness in mandalas created by Tibetan Buddhists and exhibited in the dreams of humans the world over. It is in this spirit that the Four Rivers flow—to keep us in the flow. 

During this time, Mike became interested in psychology, specifically Jungian psychology. 

This is why many of his compositions are named after archetypes of the collective unconscious, a Jungian concept of shared cultural memory. But it also meant Moss found a bridge from music to psychology and set off to gain the credentials necessary to function in this profession of psychology.  

For years Mike labored to get a Masters Degree in Counseling Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison which he received in 1969. He managed to have a private practice, work as a school psychologist in NYC, and to hold down a number of different positions in clinics as he worked himself up the professional ladder. In 1973 he received a second master’s degree in psychology from the New School for Social Research. Finally, Moss decided to drop everything to pursue the doctoral degree in Psychology, again at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, beginning in 1986.

The Ph.D. was not easy, but the fun part was the dissertation. Moss provided solid data correlating C.G. Jung’s concept from his theory of psychological types of the intuitive function with creativity. Intuition and creativity could be measured and statistically proven to be highly correlated with one another. He is the first to attempt this feat. After achieving his Ph.D., he went on to write a book that used his work as a springboard to understand intuition, creativity, and physics, another one of his passions. Entitled Searching for the Lost Chord:  Creativity and Intuition (https://wordpress.com/page/m2-theory.com/27),  the book attempts to approach physics from a psychological point of view so as to comprehend the meaning of our physical universe from a spiritual point of view. This book, and many articles on diverse topics, are published by ERG Publishing Company, a press set up by Dr. Moss, that releases Moss’s music in addition to his writings and can be found on his webpage, https://M2-Theory.com.

Upon being graduated in 1991, Michael decided to take up residence in the Philadelphia area while at the same time maintaining his base in NYC. He worked as a full-time licensed psychologist, primarily in nursing homes, and had a private practice which he continued until retiring in 2017.

Musically, Moss continued to work with dancers, primarily his wife, Judith Moss, a world-class modern dancer formerly of the Paul Sanasardo-Donya Feuer Dance Company, then the Paul Sanasardo Dance Company, and who was a founding member of Dan Wagoner and Dancers. 

Looking Forward

For the 40 years Moss worked as a psychologist. His parallel track was music or as he has said:

I play the blues, I paid my dues, you can’t fit in my shoes, been around, got a big sound.  Free–that’s me.  Standards–do them all–playing them since I was small.  Jazz standards, ok.  Write my own stuff all the way–from simple chordal vamps and blowin’ tunes to complex through-composed choral piece based on poetry of Louisa Strous Boiman and the Third Book of Moses, Lamentations.  What can I say?  I play–bass clarinet, clarinet, soprano and tenor saxes, flute, non-western instruments and love Irish music, world music and anything with complex meter—love the Balkan stuff.  Klez?  African?  Western and Eastern European?  All cool.  Into Beethoven and Bartok.  Produced records with my own groups playing my own original music on my own record label, 4th Stream Records.  Led Free Life Communication, a NYC musicians’ coop in NYC in the ‘70s where I met Richie Beirach, Dave Liebman, Greg Kogan, Mike Mahaffay, and the best people in the city.  Hung out.  Different scenes—Harlem and downtown on the LES when it was dangerous.

On 4th Stream Records and ERG Publishing, started in 1976, Moss produced multiple LPs, cassettes, and CDs. Past-President of Free Life Communication, former Music Director of Loft in the Sky Jazz Festival in Lexington, NY, and a Board Member of the Madison Music Collective, Moss has been the recipient of numerous grants (Meet the Composer, NYSCA, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, CREATE—Greene County Council on the Arts).  

Once he retired from a lifetime of work as a psychologist Moss decided to concentrate all his energies on playing and writing music. He started the New York Free Quartet, a collaborative group with Steve Cohn (piano), Larry Roland (bass, spoken word) and Chuck Fertal (drums), and released Free Play (2015), Dream Time, and In Between Gigs…CAN YOU DIG?! on 4th Stream Records (www.michaelmoss.bandcamp.com). Along with guitarist Billy Stein he released INTERVALS, a CD of duets (4th Stream Records, ERG Publishing 2013, cdbaby@cdbaby.com), appeared on Natural (Mahaffay Music Archives, 2013) and constructed a sound palette on New York and Me with internationally acclaimed storyteller Regina Ress (ERG 2012) with whom he has appeared multiple times at the Provincetown Playhouse. Moss began to write a conceptual piece for small group but it expanded into a five movement through-composed work integrating free music and many solos that he named The Old One, plus another one called See Sharp or Be Flat/C# or Bb inspired by the time he didn’t look where he was going and tripped and fell, breaking his leg, hence the title see sharp or you will be flat. To perform it he had to form his own a 22 member renaissance jazz orchestra, the Accidental Orchestra, in 2016. Theyappear on HELIX  (4th Stream Records (2018) https://michaelmoss.hearnow.com/helix.  

Once retired Moss started small and then expanded. By 2019 he developed a piece he recorded in 1978, Ain Soph,which became a 13 movement piece based on the Kabbalah which was performed by the Accidental Orchestra backed by a Grant from Lower Manhattan Cultural Council entitled Entanglement::Qaballa at Westbeth Home to the Arts where he has been living with his wife of 55. He intended to record Entanglement::Qaballa when covid hit in March, 2020 making it impossible to even be in the same room as one other musician. Personal plans to record were placed on hold and he escaped to Lexington, NY where he had bought a home  in 2013. Sequestered in his upstate New York country house Moss looked around and found in his library: 

enough books on music to put myself through grad school in an academic music program—which I studied. My conception of composition evolved quickly. I learned how to conduct, at least on a basic, fundamental level. The rules of music that I had intuited finally found the conceptual framework I had denied myself at an early age. And I discovered that beyond my first loves of Gregorian chants, Indian ragas and Irish music, Balkan meter, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and Bartok lay the abstract charms of Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg put it all together for me so I could integrate jazz, folk music from around the world which later became world music 40 years after I followed John Coltrane into the world of Indian ragas, and composition for large groups and choruses. I could begin to put into practice that which I had written about in my doctoral dissertation on intuition and creativity that utilized the theory of psychological types by Carl Jung. 

I could see the connections between creativity and physics. Music for me is a quantum experience. I use the concept in quantum physics of superposition. To me, any note played implies many different possible notes to play. I call that superposition. Once the next note is played, more variations come into view. Has anyone else ever thought of music this way and, specifically, has any improvising jazz musician felt like they were not in total control of their output but couldn’t put into words what was happening? I began viewing improvisation from a cubist perspective.

Finally, covid ended and Moss really hit the ground running. When was asked to perform in the summer of 2021 in Little Island, the brand new downtown New York venue in its very first year of programming he formed ROOTS to SHOOTS, a new group featuring Alexis Marcelo (keys), Adam Lane (bass), Warren Smith, Michael Wimberly and Ismael Baiz (drums, percussion, vibes) with Moss on Bb clarinet, bass clarinet, tenor and soprano saxophones, flute, non-western instruments along with soul singer Bobby Harden on vocals. ROOTS to SHOOTS then played at St. John’s in the Village and in July, 2022 performed and recorded an electroacoustic composition “Quantum Butterfly/Adjacent Possibles” in collaboration with internationally acclaimed electronic composer James Dashow on another CREATE grant in the Bridge Street Theatre in Catskill, NY. 

In 2022 Moss formed a string ensemble he named Ensemble Bows with 4 violins (Rosi Hertlein, Sana Nagano, Trina Basu, Liz Taub), 2 violas (Alexandra Honigsberg, Jon Kass), 2 cellos (Lenny Mims, Jake Charkey), acoustic bass (Ratzo Harris), piano (Alexis Marcelo), plus himself on bass clarinet for which he composed three pieces, Ain Soph, Elegy for Danny, and Abyss. They appeared in October, 2022 at St. Johns in the Village in a program entitled Family Threads shared with his wife, dancer-choreographer Judith Moss, who performed her original choreography Crossing Borders/Undocumented, a moving multi-media piece dedicated to her parents who escaped from Europe during the holocaust. A smaller version of Ensemble Bows, now a piano quintet with violinists Rosi Hertlein and Sunjay Jayaram, violist Melanie Dyer, cellist Lenny Mims, bassist Ken Filiano, and pianist Anthony Coleman performed in Westbeth in May, 2023 as part of the First Fridays Concert Series playing Abyss and a world premiere of Far Away, a composition written exclusively for him by Romanian composer Sorin Lerescu. Ensemble Bows appeared in December, 2023 at the Bridge Street Theatre in Catskill, NY for which Moss received a grant from CREATE Council on the Arts featuring him on Bb and bass clarinets, Jason Hwang on violin, Lenny Mims on cello, James Ilgenfritz on bass and pianist Anthony Coleman.

This is all to say that Moss has professionally recorded and mastered all his post-covid performances and is ready to catch the rest of the world up with his mushrooming body of work. ROOTS to SHOOTS has played in three venues—Little Island, St. Johns in the Village, and Bridge Street Theatre in Catskill, NY so there is a lot of material to share—jazz standards ranging from Monk to Dolphy and Claire Fisher,and original material. Ensemble Bows in all of its iterations were well recorded. It is time.

He is not done yet. Moss plans to record what he put off because of covid—his 13 movement composition based on the Kabbalah and the Tree of Life Entanglement::Qaballa. As he says enthusiastically:  “I can’t wait!”