Tom Moore & Sherry Finzer: A Journey for Mankind
Heart Dance Records

With A Journey for Mankind, multi-instrumentalist Tom Moore and flutist Sherry Finzer celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, whose July 16, 1969 launch climaxed in the historic moment five days later when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to touch the moon's surface. The subject matter offers vast potential, given the heightened character of the event. There's the grandeur and eerie silence of outer space, for starters, but also the spectrum of emotions the astronauts experienced, from the exhilaration of touching down on the lunar surface to the anxiety they must have endured thinking about whether the liftoff would go as planned. Simply put, such a topic gives musical interpreters no shortage of material to work with.

Moore and Finzer would seem to be especially good candidates for such a project: by his own description, the former creates transcendent ‘Space Music' designed to lift us beyond the corporeal realm to a spiritual one attuned to the timelessness of space that at the same time enables us to experience inner being; the Phoenix, Arizona-based Finzer, on the other hand, is recognized as a classically trained New Age specialist who oversees the operation of her Heart Dance Records imprint when not recording her own music. Both artists create and perform atmospheric instrumentals geared towards healing and meditative practices.

“Dawn at the Coast” opens the forty-four-minute release on a suitably ethereal note, with billowing synthesizer washes and flute and piano figures creating a sense of drama and mystery. Electronic drumming lends “Trans-lunar” animation and rhythmic heft, but live drumming would make the material feel more organic; regardless, the recording's better tracks are those where drumming's omitted and the focus is firmly on atmospheric ambient production. Using restraint to suggest the ineffable, the partners grapple with the deep mysteries in “Shadow of the Moon.” In this meditative set-piece and the subsequent “Blue Pearl in a Black Sky,” soft choir-like exhalations drift serenely through the air alongside the whisper of the flute and gently undulating synth washes. Hardly inappropriate given the subject matter, a certain sci-fi quality enters into the recording via “Tranquility Base,” the musicians effectively evoking the stillness of space and the smallness of the human within the limitless expanse of the universe.

While electric guitar textures enhance “A Song for Distant Earth,” Finzer's flute is the album's primary humanizing element, with the warmth and richness of her vibrato-laden sound making her playing stand out (using what I'm guessing to be regular and bass flutes, she even duets with herself during “Trans-earth”). Any recording featuring Finzer's flute is one I'm happy to hear, and without wishing to downplay Moore's considerable contributions to A Journey for Mankind, it's her playing that most recommends it.

September 2019