Sol Mogerman, June 21, 1945 California "Coulda been NMA"

A tribute to my friend and collaborator who enabled me to discover my musical performing self... including videos from our duo (2Thirds) and trio (AMO) outings over the last year and a half.

This week, during the eighth session of the trio that I proudly have belonged to since 2019 (Available Moral Outrage), guitarist and vocalist Sol remarked that “we could have been at New Music America, if it had continued”, to which I agreed, even noting that I wouldn’t have to use my status as an alumni and festival archivist to convince them.

We have gotten to be that good. Of course, NMA had been in my blood since the 1990s but all that I learned about the world of sound was not of much use in the Canadian Maritimes and Montana. As it turns out, all that it took to unlock that creative streak was to find a compatible musician to collaborate with.

Sprechgesang is actually the genre I gave to the songs that are featured on his simultaneous three releases of new works at the age of 73, as though they are heavily folk-singer-songwriter, Sol’s unique technique on the guitar creates a quite unusual cloud in which the words just gently glide by. New Music America led me to Sol, though, as Eugene Chadbourne’s visit to Victoria in 2017 lured me to a local legendary venue, Logan’s Pub (closed forever during COVID).

Sol and the duo Tremblers of Sevens were the opening acts, and I was enthralled with all three; I wrote about the Tremblers, earning the notice and later friendship of Scott Bennett who recorded all three parts of the evening for his you tube channel Microphonic Fool, and here’s your equally impressive introduction to his oeuvre, if you haven’t Sol-led yet!

In January of 2019, Sol released three albums: Chain of Life, Was It Fun and Feed the Masses. They included many new songs and adapted old ones (due to a major accident in the eighties, he had to relearn how to use his hands to accommodate a disability and didn’t play for almost two decades). The albums had some of the older songs he had played when he grew up in Northern California in the sixties and seventies, and some new creations featuring the poetry of his wife Gundula, who we lost in 2022. He followed that up at the end of the year with his fourth of 2019, Yo.

Soundcloud versions here, all downloadable:

Chain of Life Was It Fun Feed the Masses Yo

At the end of the summer of 2019, I ceased my program Music of the Last Century at The Station (the story of my two years there will form a lot of the second year of this Substack), but not before hosting a last episode in which I invited Sol to come to play in the live radio studio.

By this time, I had been accompanying him for a couple of months during the recording of new tracks - some of which had become our own first album - and by show time, I had begun to play along with him on tunes with my newly purchased $25 thrift store Yamaha pizzer keyboard. At this point, I had maybe a total of 45 hours lifetime playing a full piano.

For a while, the Station posted the program on their Soundcloud site, but despite it being the third most popular file of 2019, it was removed as part of a purge of some 300 audio files in 2022. Of course, I kept my own copies and so here we are together in the live radio studio during my program Music of the Last Century. In a slightly avant-garde passive-aggressive move, I kind of hinted it wasn’t a happy cessation of the program by inserting at the onset a one minute split track of Warren Burt’s Music for Tuning Forks on the left channel and BBC’s crying children on the right channel. The rest was fairly standard.

At the end of the fall of 2019 though, the tracks we had participated in had turned into a full album and all of it has been uploaded in my Soundcloud file for the album - we called ourselves Available Moral Outrage and the album’s title track was the last song we played on the radio program - Mandatory Retirement, in which Sol helped express quieter feelings of my troubles with the Station. But more on that later - this program was Sol’s radio debut in Victoria, and we’re still awaiting the second airing.

The first four tracks have been there for a while and I included lyrics and details when I posted them in 2019, and the last five are still to be expanded upon, as they’ve just been made available today.

Soundcloud downloadable version here: Mandatory Retirement

So, kind of jumping ahead in the recent musical story of Sol Mogerman; his biography is extensive and he has published a few books, both fictional and not. My collaborations with Sol and Scott will be also a featured part of the second year of this substack.

During the first couple of years during COVID, Sol and I were apart, though we phoned and emailed often. As I started to train myself on the unused piano in my house, Sol encouraged me and (mostly) always enjoyed hearing what I came up with using an unusual training routine, and giving me feedback on the development of my pianistic-percussion style.

By 2023, we finally got together again musically. I had gotten a new loaner phone-camera and was ready to record our new kind of collaborations as he had gotten an electric guitar (which he named the Mogercaster) and was curious to see if we would be able to create new works without the hinderance of conventional music rules.

And this time my New Music America composer chops came out of hiding - we have done one or two a month since, and we’re up to 23 sessions together (usually with two or three pieces closing in an hour’s sound each time) and this, titled Ay Ya Ma has been our most viewed thus far. (The side room is unheated, which explains the warm clothing, and this is from March, 2023.)

By September 2023, we had reunited with Scott Henderson who brought his own little exotic gadgets and have had seven sessions in the same unused shop attached to the house (for which I’m eternally grateful to my landlady to provide!), of course being the same three individuals under the name of Available Moral Outrage. But now instead of speech-songs, we have created a music we call avant-dementia, the borderline(s) between intentional and organic mind chaos. Or just plain “free improv” but that term scares people… This one’s from March 2024:

and finally, this week we completed a full circle by returning to the studio where we recorded Mandatory Retirement in 2019, the Château Malléable and it’s now obvious that I really do need to get a camera tripod, as during the third section, the phone fell into the plant that was holding it and thus we got a very nice almost-still image to go with our sounds. Scott was playing a small modular synth and we’re hoping that the gopro version will capture more of his elegant upright bass and other sounds. On the other hand, there are Ugandan and South American radio DJs, kitten whispers, goats, BBC women booing, whoops and bloops and hollers and much to enjoy in these three pieces! Happy birthday, Sol!

All three of last Wednesday’s session and all of the other AMO and 2Thirds (Sol and I) sessions can be found at my primary you tube account:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjLWipw2gnTGtSoJgfk7PeA

Above: substack video; below youtube - all from my phone camera