Trip to the Moon

William Dart travels to the moon and beyond, charting two decades of Tom Ludvigson and Trevor Reekie’s Trip to the Moon albums, and looking at their new two-man improv album, Roto.

Put the words moon and music together, and everybody has a favourite piece – from Dorothy Lamour singing 'The Moon of Manakoora' to Van Morrison giving us 'Moondance'.

Today, I’m not feeling like a movie queen or a blue-eyed soul-man, but ... I am in a bit on a loungey mood, setting up a moonscape with Dr Samuel J Hoffman and his trusty theremin. Surrounded here by studio voices, strings, harp and Carmen Cavallaro style piano, the good doctor lays out a spooky lunar rhapsody.

Put moon and music together in this country and you come up with Tom Ludvigson and Trevor Reekie – two men who, for just over 20 years, have been working together under the name of Trip to the Moon, a keyboard man and a guitarist who, in the sanctuary of the studio, get together and concoct their own hip brand of musical ambience.

Often with guests such as trumpeter Greg Johnson, who opened the band’s 1997 debut album in smokey, smouldering style – a Chet Baker in the making back then if ever there were. The piece is titled 'Conversation with Carlos', the album Jazz Hop.

Trip to the Moon is both a labour of love and an act of devotion for Tom Ludvigson and Trevor Reekie.

For some, their music might veer towards the esoteric at times, but as contributors to this country’s deeply committed community of creative musicians, they have asserted themselves. And they have been noticed, from the very beginning, when this first album was nominated as the best Kiwi Jazz outing of that year.

Working together, painstakingly and with the time that was available (Reekie also being caught up in managing his Pagan record label back in the early days), a second album, Dusk, appeared in 1999 and a third, Pretty Cool, in 2002.

Far from hitting the charts, which many of Reekie’s Pagan artists did, Trip to the Moon cultivated and rewarded a niche audience. Not to say that, deep down in their musical souls, these two men might have had dreams of the radio successes that they saw and heard around them.

And they tried to join that club, with a radio mix of 'Catch my Fall', featuring appropriately soulful vocals by the late Bobbylon of the Hallelujah Picassos, floating on the cushioning reverb of Trevor Reekie’s guitar. In the best words of Cole Porter, it’s de-lovely.

Trip to the Moon’s fourth album, 2008’s Welcome to the Big Room was a turning point.

Take it off the shelf and your eye was caught first by Hakan Ludvigson’s gleaming Shanghai images on its cover. More than just visual decoration, I thought at the time. Rather, I suspect that we were being gently reminding us that this brand of jazzy trip-hop was no Antipodean orphan, but very much a part of a larger global movement.

Yet, at the same time, the back cover bore the quotation of a Maori proverb “Ahakoa He Iti, He Pounamu”, translated as “Although it is small, it is precious” … words that have been coming back to me while I’ve been enjoying Tom Ludvigson and Trevor Reekie’s latest release.

Guests on 2008’s Welcome to the Big Room included guitarist Nigel Gavin playing his fretless glissentar and Jim Langabeer on shakuhachi flute and sopranino saxophone. Greg Johnson’s there with his trumpet and flugelhorn but, new to these sessions, Johnny Fleury brings in a Chapman stick on two exotically titled tracks, 'Shanghai' and 'Buddha'.

For me, the most ambitious offering here is a 'Song for Harry Partch', tributing a composer who was one of the grand old men of the American alternative music scene, a maverick who managed to squeeze over fifty different pitches into an octave, instead of the piano’s meagre 12. And, in doing so, he created the perfect soundworld for a piece with a title like 'The Bewitched'.

It’s fascinating to hear just how Ludvigson, Reekie and their band tribute this man and his music in their 'Song for Harry Partch'.

It’s not overtly microtonal, with its shifting dunes of pretty diatonic, everyday harmonies, but, just when you least expect it and the jamming coalesces, notes bend, twist and smudge into something that’s categorically not major or minor … followed by the electronics taking over.

Moving on to 2016 and the last Trip to the Moon album, A Traveller’s Tale, we find that once again it’s an accumulation of some years of work, in this case four trips through the seasons, chipping together their musical mosaics.

Settled around a core quintet of Ludwigson, Reekie, Johnson, Gavin and Langabeer, there are, if not wild new departures, certainly expressive deviations.

To start with, how many people, like me, might brace themselves for a medicinal dose of Throbbing Gristle, or noisier, if they were to come across a track titled 'Industrial'?

The shortish offering on A Traveller’s Tale with that title is far from factory floor grind, coming along with the threat of potential hearing loss.

To my ears, there’s a real delicacy here, a sonic abstraction that’s not so evident in what I’ve been playing so far.

Immerse yourself, surrender to the almost pointillist groove and, who knows, you might imagine yourself hearing birdsong in the mix … with good reason.

Trip to the Moon had very much extended its sonic vocabulary in its 2012 album The Invisible Line to embrace Haitham Mazyan’s oud, a Middle Eastern lute, and I’m sure that I can detect the influence of this instrument coming through four years later on another Traveller’s Tale track 'Where Have I Been'.

Greg Johnson’s trumpet is centrestage here, giving out its own urban nocturne but, if you manage to resist falling into a state of total beguilement under his sway, you’ll find special pleasure in what’s playing around him — the gentle shift of harmonies, very much giving the impression of a major/minor meld and, above all, the husky breathy sonics from reed man Jim Langabeer.

The leap from that track in 2016 to Tom Ludvigson and Trevor Reekie’s new duo album, titled Roto, is giant, sideways and organic.

Roto’s title track steals, or rather oscillates upon one, as the two men relinquish the temptations of overdubs, so much part of Trip to the Moon’s practice, and create music of the moment as they put it, interactive co-compositions made up in the studio, recorded directly to digital multitrack.

There’s a real sense of musical dialogue going on here, whether you’re drawn to Reekie’s string shufflings and scamperings or the graceful arches that Ludvigson allows his right hand to dance.

The longest track on the Roto album is titled 'The Hourglass' and runs at just under eleven minutes. With no explanation given as to its naming, one is at liberty to romance a bit or look closely within oneself and within the music, for possible meanings.

Is it perhaps just an image to get us contemplating the whole issue of time. The same time that takes music through its trajectory, giving the sounds being created a temporal architecture for an ambitious ten minutes and fifty-eight seconds.

It is, however, well able to be navigated.

Various sections fall in place but, from the beginning, expect to be seduced by the edgy partnership of strings and things electronic, the consonances and dissonances that Reekie’s fingers draw forth, and Ludvigson builds upon.   

A major chord, turned sour, around the one-minute mark, introduces a series of arrested acoustic piano chords, that Ludvigson eventually allows to break free.

And a lingering harmony at the three-minute mark on which the two men come together is another marker but, midway through the piece, there are even more startling departures.

After passages which embrace what I hear as evoking Middle Eastern hues, with something of the flavor of a classic John Coltrane line, everything settles momentarily on a smoothly tonal groove.

There’s cheeky electronica. And is that, at one point, an attempt to stab out 'God Save the Queen'?, I wondered on first listening.

But there’s more to come, even as the guitar strums a firm 4/4. Voices, difficult to decipher, intrude, fragments of mystery.

It’s a fascinating and tempting mix that Tom Ludvigson and Trevor Reekie are putting before us here and, by the final minute or so of the track, there is a sense of closure coming upon us.

Ludvigson returns with his acoustic piano figures, transforming them in reverberant song in a shimmering forest of strings from Trevor Reekie.  

There is one track on this album to which I’ve kept returning.

'Fantasy Garden' has been described by one reviewer as "disconcerting" and by another as music to either nod off to, stare out the window blissfully with, or go into a cold sweat.

I understand all points of view as there’s something deeply confrontational in the piece’s insistence on long and drawn out harmonies.

But for those like me, trained as a pianist and taught to be ever so careful with our right foot pedal so as not to blur our Beethoven and Brahms, 'Fantasy Garden' is something of a Blur Heaven. With its own heavenly rewards.

Music Details

'Song title' (Composer) – Performers
Album title
(Label)

'Lunar Rhapsody' (Revel) – Dr Samuel J Hoffman (theremin), Orchestra and chorus / Leslie Baxter
Music Out of the Moon
(Basta)

'Conversation with Carlos' (Ludvigson, Reekie) – Trip To The Moon
Jazz Hop
(Antenna)

'Catch My Fall (remix)' (Ludvigson, Reekie) – Trip To The Moon
If Licks Could Kill - The @ntenna Compilation
(Antenna)

'The Bewitched' (Partch) – University of Illinois Ensemble/John Garvey
The Music of Harry Partch
(CRI)

'Song For Harry Partch' (Ludvigson, Reekie) – Trip To The Moon
Welcome to the Big Room
(Ode)

'Industrial' (Ludvigson, Reekie) – Trip To The Moon
A Traveller’s Tale
(Jazzscore)

'Where Have I Been?' (Ludvigson, Reekie) – Trip To The Moon
A Traveller’s Tale
(Jazzscore)

'Roto' (Ludvigson, Reekie) – Tom Ludvigson and Trevor Reekie
Roto
(Jazzscore)

'The Hourglass' (Ludvigson, Reekie) – Tom Ludvigson and Trevor Reekie
Roto
(Jazzscore)

'Fantasy Garden' (Ludvigson, Reekie) – Tom Ludvigson and Trevor Reekie
Roto
(Jazzscore)