Most New Yorkers over 50 remember Moondog né Louis Hardin: Starting in 1947, for three decades he stood on Sixth Avenue and 54th Street, a long-bearded blind man banging drums for passersby. Some thought this man crazy. But Moondog made many records, some on his own label, and his performances on the street provided him with instant recognition. A modernist who never lost his old-fashioned love for swing rhythms and baroque fugues, Moondog brought his own vocabulary to compositional techniques: Five-beat rhythms became "snake time," and the overtone series was "the Cosmicode." And according to the notes from his first domestic release in 26 years, Sax Pax for a Sax, all those musical devices are part of a series that the composer (now 81 and living in Germany) calls zajaz – jazz in two directions, like a Janus head showing two faces. Wiggy!

So what's behind the smoke here? Mostly gentle canonic pieces written for up to nine saxophonists, driven by the composer's metronomic bassdrum beats. Moondog's simple compositions hardly ever extend beyond one theme: The melody is introduced, a web of counterpoint is built, and it's a wrap. It all sounds a bit like the 1980s jazz-classical bagatelles of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, with the bassdrum beats adding a whiff of Duke Ellington's early jungle records. Yet there's an undeniable, naive beauty to the music; Moondog even has a vocal chorus sing love songs to New York and Paris. Coming from one of the hulking mysteries of modern music, Sax Pax for a Sax is a sweetheart of a record. (RS 780)

BEN RATLIFF