Free Jazz Missionaries, Part II (2018)

Mosely (back L), Nusbaum, Moran (back center), Moss, Baker       SKepecs © 2018

One of the big deals on the city’s bustling start-of-summer agenda last weekend was the three-day Madison Reunion – bringin’ the ‘60s back home to the Memorial Union – organized by Ben and Judy Sidran.  I was a hippie student living in Miffland in those glory days when the (now defunct) Mifflin Street Co-Op was the White Front Grocery Store, the Nitty Gritty was a funkier place called Glen n’ Ann’s, and Louis Farrakhan hadn’t yet split up the black/Jewish alliance that was a cornerstone of the Civil Rights movement.  The ‘60s never left me, but I attended just one Madison Reunion event – the gig by the Imitations, late Friday afternoon (June 15) on the Union Terrace. The Imitations were – for me, and for a lot of other folks – the best part of those dancin’, soul clappin’, colorblind years.  The Imitations were, to paraphrase one of the musicians I interviewed for a feature I wrote about the band for Isthmus in 2009, the pied pipers we lined up to follow from gig to gig.1

The Imitations got started in ‘63, melding Motown backbeat with the freedoms of postbop; with a few personnel changes as players graduated and moved on the band became Sebastian Moon in 1967. The Imitations / Sebastian Moon unleashed ‘60s-style dance mania at the Terrace, Great Hall, and a string of unforgettable summertime be-ins and love-ins on Picnic Point that were the quintessence of Mad City’s hippie scene. 

By the end of the decade we still love to romanticize as we roll toward old age, it was all over.  Seeing the Imitations again live on the Terrace in 2018 – three of the original musicians (Michael Moss and Bobby Baker on sax and flute and Mel Nusbaum – aka Sebastian Moon –  on guitar, rounded out by Nick Moran on bass and Dushun Mosely on drums) was nostalgic, hilarous, historic – a timewarp antidote to Trump times despite the heat and humidity, the wind, and the inadequate sound system. 

But I was out there dancing on the concrete by myself.  One other woman – an old friend of mine, a dancer like me – sat grinning at a table down in front.  The terrace actually was chock-full, but when Nussbaum recited a litany of famous Imitations gigs we were the only two in the crowd shouting “we were there!”

Since there were hundreds of ‘60s veterans at the Madison Reunion, most of whom have to have been at at least some of the Imitations / Sebastian Moon gigs, you gotta wonder – where were they Friday afternoon?

                                        __________________________________________ SK

1  Here's the link to my 2009 piece:

https://isthmus.com/music/madisons-imitations-were-the-sound-of-60s-radicalism/
For some reason the online version is missing the end, so here it is: 
Nusbaum ended up in New Jersey with an MBA and a computer technology business. "Music was never good to me in terms of money," he says. But he bought a piano to go with his guitar. He jams weekly with friends, including Moss. He's got three MP3 albums of his own quirky compositions, plus an adventure in Latin and blues, on his enigmatic website, sebastianmoon.com.

Moss is still the farthest-out cat. He's in New York, leading a double life as practicing psychologist and musical polymath. For a while he investigated the concept of Renaissance orchestras, writing and arranging music for cellos and violins. From far-flung travels he's wrought world jazz. And he's still searching for new scales.