news story / By Bob Doran

The Music Director

(Dec. 4, 2008)  To put it simply, The Glasnost Family Holiday is a musical, and every musical requires a music director. The assignment went to Gregg Moore, a natural choice if you know anything about his work. Dell’Arte Founding Artistic Director Joan Schirle gave him a call as the piece was coming together. He was glad to hear from her.

“Music for theater is a big part of what I do and there’s so little of it to do around here,” said Moore in a conversation a couple of days before the show was set to open.

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His task: “To bring them some new music, specifically Christmas music and music in odd meters. They fancied themselves an East European group, only they weren’t really doing anything in odd meters — and that’s the hallmark of a lot of East European musics.”

As leader of the alternative brass band Bandemonium, Moore knows his odd marching band music. And, by chance, he has been working on another project that required music in odd meters: a short film being made by Anthony Lucero of Circus Remedy. The work-in-progress, Prophet the Fox, is a shadow puppet play with an East Euro feel.

“So I took them some of that music and some other things I had done before, including a couple of Christmas tunes. I’d ripped off a Marty Paich arrangement: Years ago he did a version of ‘Jingle Bells’ in seven for a Barbra Streisand record. I stole the idea, just because it worked so well.” (He illustrated this by humming the tune while drumming a wild beat on the tabletop.)

Moore also worked with the Glasnost band on refining the music they’d already put together. “It was great what they’d come up with. They had a whole show of material with some really tight numbers, like the ‘Sleigh Ride’ thing.”

It’s actually an understatement to say Moore was a natural for the job of music director for a wild and crazy show (with odd meters). The son of College of the Redwoods jazz/world music prof Jerry Moore, Gregg grew up in a decidedly musical household. After heading to Utah for college, he ended up spending three decades in Europe playing music and working with theatre groups before returning to Humboldt County, where he has done the same.

“I went over [to the Netherlands] in 1975 with the Great Salt Lake Mime Troupe, a theatre and dance group that had grown out of the dance department at the University of Utah, where I had studied,” he recalled, detailing how he became a 30-year expatriate.

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