Moriarty Ad Lib

Okay, we all know he can act, thought our cultural correspondent when he saw Moriarty in New York. But when he started to play...

When we first encountered the eclectic Michael Moriarty ’63 he was debuting in the film “Bang the Drum Slowly”. Both Moriarty and co-star Robert DeNiro gave spot-on performances that left us certain we had discovered the next massive thing (or things). Not long thereafter he played that dreadful Nazi on television’s “Holocaust” mini-series—played him so dreadfully well, in fact, that we almost came not to like Moriarty. Then there was his turn as a New York impresario in the eighties, with his starry-eyed Potter’s Field theater troupe. Just about that time we caught him on Broadway in the hit revival of The Cain MutinyCourt Martial,and then, next thing we knew, he was back on television. But this time he was playing a very nice guy, not a Nazi at all. His newest and still current incarnation is as Ben Stone, the lawyerly half of NBC’s “Law and Order” series, which has just begun its fourth season. Moriarty gives an intelligent, incisive perfor- mance in the tube’s most intelligent, incisive weekly show. Lie’s been nominated for an Emmy each of his three years with “L&O”; that’s an award he had already won twice before he even joined the crime show.

After all that variety and spice, at any rate, we fig- ured we would no longer be surprised when Michael popped up in some new setting, any new setting. We felt ourselves immune to future episodes of Moriarty-shock.

And then we heard that a combo under Michael’s name was settling in for a week’s stay at one of our favorite jazz clubs, Fat Tuesday’s. We were surprised to learn that Michael could still surprise us after all.

The New Yorker has said that if submarines had jazz clubs, they would look like Fat Tuesday’s. An apt description, if the submarine has a must-smoke section: Fat Tuesday’s is a narrow, subterranean, thoroughly jazzy place. Upon arriving, we dived down the stairway and made our way not too bumptiously to a crowded, right-up-against-the-stage table. Promptly at eight, the lights went down for the first of Michael’s two Saturday-night sets.

Moriarty is the pianist and singer for whatever band he has cobbled together in a particular season to promote that season’s CD. At the time we saw the Moriarty band, they had two CDs in release, each filled largely with Moriarty compositions. We own one of the CDs and we like it, but we are not professional jazz critics, and therefore we will defer to John S. Wilson of The Times, who also caught the Fat Tuesday’s gig: “As a pianist, Adr. Moriarty has a light and airy touch that gives his music an easy, rhythmic flow, while his singing ranges from husky intimacy to a clipped, punchy style that he used very effectively on the usually slow and mournful ‘What’s New?’ His compositions reflect the direct, uncluttered manner of his playing.”

We agree with all of that. On the night we saw him play, Michael was in buoyant spirits. He is no head- down-dour jazz pianist. His actorish eye-contact is almost embarrassing at times. The women in the audi- ence loved it; if the room hadn’t been so packed that it precluded swooning, and a couple of them might have swooned when Michael serenaded them with Jerome Kern’s “I’m Old Fashioned.” His playing is fluid and never static, and there is real invention to it. Much of what he played were Moriarty compositions, and they had an edge to them. He writes melodies, but they’re involved, post-bop melodies. No Yanni, he.

The critic Wilson also wrote in The Times, “An effort at scat-singing by Air. Moriarty is heavy-handed and he overplays his dimpled charm when he is singing.”

We beg to differ with the former charge. And Ms. Teddie Maphet of Bayonne, New Jersey, begs to differ with the latter.

Michael’s single scat on Saturday night was in the aforementioned performance of “What’s New,” and it was a humorous pantomime tagged on at the end and played direcdy into the adoring eyes of a female fan at Table Three. I should add that precisely seven nights before we caught Moriarty we attended a magical Ella Fitzgerald concert at Radio City. Even after hearing sensation scat-singing by the Queen herself, we weren’t put off by Michael’s lighthearted digression.

I J o o Now, as to Wilson’s second point: Our next-door neighbor at crowded Table One, Ms. Maphet, didn’t mind the dimpled charm at all. “The dimpled charm, that’s why I’m here!” she said frankly. Ms. Maphet is a mature woman who was accompanied by her daughter and son-in-law. All of them are big fans of “Law and Order.” “I can’t believe someone would criticize his dimpled charm!” Ms. Maphet went on. “I’ll tell you, I didn’t even know he sang. But boy, can he!” When Moriarty breathed the plaintive lyrics he had written for the earthy Jimmy Rowls tune, “Peacocks,” Ms. Maphet whispered absently, “Gosh, he really turns me on.”

Between sets, we sat near the bar and chatted briefly with Moriarty. He was all smiles, as he relaxed in a tweed jacket that would have been appropriate at Sanborn House tea in 1963. He sipped black java, as jazzmen are wont to do.

Moriarty remembered being envious of a Dartmouth classmate who enjoyed an aptitude for jazz. That was back in the early sixties, when Davis, Coltrane, at al. were taking bop to places yet unimag- ined. Moriarty responded to the language of the music, and, he said, has been serious about jazz pianism for two decades or more. “The music’s a regular part of my day now,” he said. “My job is acting, but this is a seri- ous part of my life.”

Okay, so now we knew that jazz, too, was a seri- ous part of Michael’s life. Acting, jazz, poetry (did we tell you about the poetry?), playwriting (we should’ve mentioned the three plays), sculpting (we haven’t seen his sculpture, 50...). Okay, fine, the point is—no more surprises.

Then we were awakened by our alarm-clock radio, and the classical-music DJ on QXR was talking about that coming evening’s performance at Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center (that’s the place on the West Side that looks like the Hop). He said the Bacchanalia Festival Orchestra (sounded like Heorot House band to me, but I was still pretty sleepy) would play works by Bottesini, Rossini, J.S. Bach, Shostakovich, and...Moriarty.

Oh no.

But we checked with the box office, and sure enough the first piece of the evening was to be “A Theme and Variations on ‘I Wonder as I Wander’” by one M. Moriarty. So we went, and learned that, yes indeed, the M. was Michael, and he had composed a classical violin sonata.

Michael was on hand to introduce the work; the Center is only about eight blocks from the apartment he shares with his wife, Anne Martin, and son, Matthew Christopher, so this was an easy task. Michael bantered a bit with considerable and dimpled charm, and then yielded the stage to the violinist Nina Beilini. She played passionately an alternately dramatic, playful, and vigorous piece; Michael had composed his theme-and-variations in memory of the late Helen Hayes, and it seems to us that he success- fully captured several sides of that great actress. The audience, good in size, received the composition enthusiastically. (So would The Times the following morning: Moriarty’s variations, it said, “were stylisti- cally wide-ranging and fluidly expressive; not at all an amateur effort.”)

While the Bacchanalians took the stage to play the String Quartet No. 8, Op. 110 by Shostakovich, we perused our Stagebill and there found the missing key to all this musical moonlighting of Michael’s; “After graduating from Dartmouth and attending London’s Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts on a Fulbright Scholarship...” Aha! As Michael explained to ns in the lobby during intermission, he hadn’t just studied Dramatic Arts while in England, but Music, too—capital-M Music, classical jazz, and all else. At that earlier stage of his life, Michael said, he might’ve gone either way.

We chatted for a while there, and Michael said that things were going very well: the TV show was still proving interesting; the third jazz CD had been released; a fourth CD—an offering of chamber music with the working title Merely Moriarty—was being prepared; he was practicing for an upcoming concert in Baltimore at which he was going to conduct his “Symphony for String Orchestra”; he and Anne had bought a piece of land in the Berkshires and were in the process of building a house. (He visited Dartmouth recently to get architectural ideas from the Sanborn Library, in fact.) “Things are just going very well.”

“And what’s next?” we asked.

“Oh,” Michael said, tapping his forehead. “I’ve got lots of things going on.”

We replied that we were not surprised.

He does a standup job with Jill Hennessey in “Law and Order.”

Robert Sullivan is an editor at Life magazine and a manabotit town.