Music: Ex-Inquirer critic's Moon unit wants your attention, but it's OK to Lounge

THIRTY-THREE (and a third) years ago, Brian Eno famously proposed a style (and album) of soothing, ambient music that he thought would be the perfect balm for weary travelers at the airport.

Now Tom Moon, a musician/critic best known from his long stint at the Philadelphia Inquirer, is casting out a similar net to the stressed-out brand of road warrior who "huddles over their laptops" in hotel lobbies and also brings the work home.

He's doing it with an energized yet easy-on-the-ears contemporary jazz group dubbed the Moon Hotel Lounge Project and a crafty debut album, "Into the Ojala" (Frosty Cordial Records), that goes good with . . . just about everything.

Both will be celebrated in concert with a showcase Sunday at L'Etage, a posh nightclub space at 6th and Bainbridge streets.

Moon can easily envision playing the music in spots like the lobby bar of the Loew's Hotel on Market Street. "I don't even mind if people talk over a lot of it," he shared recently. "As long as they perk their ears up every once in a while, as long as there's something that grabs them."

Moon has a history as a hip, erudite and demanding critic of popular musical forms, brave enough to assemble in book form a listener's life list of "1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die" (Workman Publishing, $19.95).

Yet, in returning to his first musical vocation as a saxophone player and composer - gigs that helped see him through college and into young adulthood "playing on cruise ships and touring with Maynard Ferguson" - Moon is painfully aware that music is no longer front and center in many peoples' lives.

In his freelance writing gigs, he's seen the shift in the world of musical criticism, where even top-drawer publications like Paste are folding, and bloggers anoint themselves as instant authorities. Liner-notes assignments are harder to come by; labels today are more focused on singles than albums, on newcomers rather than career artists.

And, while a prestigious gig, Moon has to share his music commentaries on NPR's "All Things Considered" with "five other guys, including a jazz critic in his twenties who keeps calling me for insights."

In plotting this next career move back to the other side of the lights, Moon has been cautioned to take things "one step at a time" by Moon Hotel Lounge Project keyboardist and album producer Kevin Hanson - best known from the Philly-spawned bands Huffamoose and the Fractals, who also constitute most of the Moon unit.

Clearly, Moon's given all this a lot of thought. He talks about "the fine line you have to walk to be artsy and commercial at the same time in our culture. Music is almost ignorable now. It really does feel like people have a limited window for anything that asks them to think too hard or is high-concept in any way. So my thinking was, let's start from the premise people are overloaded and there's only so much interest in artistry at all. Let's not try to be anything but open and approachable . . ..

"The melodies are simple and built around whole notes. It's not 'Look at me, I can play so many notes.' It's 'Let's see if we can build a conversation between this little group of people. Maybe that's interesting.' "

So while there are nods in the recording to sax icons like "Trane and Wayne" (John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter), and to Brazilian samba master Antonio Carlos Jobim, the Moon Hotel Lounge Project would not be out of place on a bill with Steely Dan or Stevie Wonder, jazz-tinged pop talents who Moon said "have influenced almost every player of my generation."

Moon first conceived of the Project while out on his author's tour for "1,000 Recordings," a writing gig he originally conceived as taking him away from the Inky for one year but which wound up filling three (forcing his resignation from the paper), as his vision expanded to take in every kind of music under the sun, including classical, of which he initially knew little.

Yet, it's exactly that level of inclusiveness that makes this alphabetically arranged book such an interesting read as you flip through, say, a section of the E's, moving from career highpoints by the Eagles, Snooks Eaglin, Steve Earle, Earth, Wind & Fire, Edward Elgar and Duke Ellington.

Wisely, Moon has hired a national publicity firm to push his album rather than attempt to promote it himself. And he's learned enough about the way indie artists today self-publish and distribute music that he could probably put out a "how-to" book on the subject himself.

But no sense rushing things. Clearly, that tome will sell better if it has a happy ending.

L'Etage, 6th and Bainbridge streets, sets at 8 & 10 p.m. Sunday, $5, 215-592-0656, http://creperie-beaumonde.com.