“The Mooche” Thinks He Can Save Jazz. I Rode Along in His Church Van to Hear Him Out.
THE BACK BEAT · PROFILE
Joe “The Mooche” Muccioli, the founder of the Jazz Arts Project, says the whole Central Jersey jazz scene owes him a favor, a decent stand partner, and possibly bail money. At his compound near the Navesink — and behind the wheel of a decommissioned Pentecostal shuttle bus he calls, without irony, “the Gulfstream” — Muccioli makes his case for how a disco sideman with a Mahler complex became, twenty years on, the last honest hustler in jazz.
BY ROSCOE FENWICK
Parody
The Gulfstream — twenty-two feet of primer-gray church van, FIRST ASSEMBLY OF GOD still ghosted under two coats of paint, a drum kit lashed in back like contraband — is double-parked outside the deli, and Joe “the Mooche” Muccioli is already four topics deep: an old beef with a trombonist, a mural dedication he's still not sure he was invited to, and whether the Basie estate will sue him over what he's got planned for this year's gala. (“Probably. Worth it.”)
“People think I never sleep,” he says, waving off a jogger who does not appreciate the Gulfstream's turning radius. “I'm actually a homebody. I like my recliner. The Mooche thing is a costume.”
At seventy, Muccioli is marking twenty years since he founded the Jazz Arts Project, a nonprofit that has spent two decades talking serious, professionally booked musicians into driving to a small Central Jersey town to play for what he calls “exposure and a hot plate of ziti.” He calls it an anniversary. His former bandmates call it a hostage situation with a horn section.
The legend starts at Manhattan School of Music in the mid-'70s, where Muccioli paid tuition with a six-nights-a-week disco gig — mirror ball till 2 a.m. — then dragged himself to 8 a.m. orchestra rehearsal reeking, in his words, “of cologne, Aqua Net, and poor decisions.” Somehow, he landed principal trumpet on Mahler's First, and an exposed offstage solo that has ended lesser careers. His hands, famously, did not shake. He also claims, unprompted, that he once got a standing ovation for a solo he doesn't remember playing, because he'd briefly blacked out from exhaustion mid-performance and “the body just knew where to go.” Nobody has ever confirmed or denied this. Everybody repeats it anyway.
Even then, the pretensions of the leisure class were already in place. Ask him about his boat — a modest sailboat that spent as much time on sawhorses as in the water — and he'll talk about it the way other men talk about a superyacht in Monaco. “A boat is a boat,” he says. “You respect the water or the water doesn't respect you.” The water, at the time of the photo below, was approximately forty feet away and he was not yet in it.
The car was a similar exercise in scale. Long before the Gulfstream, there was the original Mooche-Mobile: a robin's-egg-blue Italian roadster he drove around Long Island like a man who'd made it, which, financially, he had not. “That car got me more dates than the trumpet ever did,” he says. “The van gets me the opposite of dates. The van gets me musicians who owe me money” It is, he'll admit, a lateral career move.
Then came the Sinfónica del Estado de México, in Toluca, which is where the stories stop being merely unlikely and start getting genuinely unhinged. Muccioli says a rehearsal blackout once left the hall pitch dark for eight full bars of Brahms, during which the orchestra kept perfect time to a downbeat nobody was giving — and when the lights snapped back on, the concertmaster's chair was empty and stayed that way for three weeks, chair and all, because nobody would go near it. He says he once traded a rented tuba to a traveling circus in exchange for a fortune-teller's reading, and that the fortune-teller told him he would spend the rest of his life getting other people to do things against their better judgment for no money. He says a UFO buzzed the outdoor amphitheater during a run of Copland and the timpanist kept playing through the whole thing “because the union break was in four minutes and he wasn't giving it up for aliens.”
On another occasion he found himself playing out in a vast field in the middle of the mountains in Central Mexico for “El Dia Del Campesino” where literally one million Mexican farmers were lined up as far as the eye could see from the stage. Each one wearing an official farmers uniform which was basically a blue denim leisure suit and a sombrero. In fact the entire 100 piece orchestra had been fitted for the same uniform so there would be unity with the workers or something like that. "We were all there to greet El Presidente. The president of Mexico". Who finally showed up after about 2 hours of lining up all the farmers and the banners and the orchestra ready on stage. The President flew in over the crowd in a helicopter. Starting from way in the back, so far away that it looked like a tiny fly until it got closer, upon which all they saw were all the million farmers hats flying up in the air from the blades of the helicopter. None of this can be verified. All of it, Muccioli insists, is “basically true.”
It's this gift for turning a blackout into folklore that eventually became the whole business model of the Jazz Arts Project. “It's not fundraising,” he says. “It's arm-twisting with better acoustics. I call a guy, I say, ‘Remember Toluca? You're playing Thursday.’ Nobody says no to me. It's a curse, honestly — I once got a guy to play a run-through at his own retirement party.”
His compound — his word — is two capes knocked together after he bought out the neighbor specifically to remove the fence between them, “for the campus.” One house has the kitchen. The other holds the Woodshed, a converted garage where a 1962 Martin Committee trumpet sits in a glass case on the wall like a saint's relic — the same trumpet, he says, that he won off an estranged trombonist in a poker game, then had blessed by an actual priest “just in case,” and which he insists once fell off the wall during a thunderstorm and landed perfectly upright, valve caps unscratched, a fact he calls “not a miracle, but I'm not ruling it out.”
Between the Woodshed, the two capes, and the Gulfstream wheezing in the driveway, Muccioli figures he's built an empire that wouldn't survive five minutes of real scrutiny. “You know how many miserable people I know with actual money?” he says. “I've got a van and a garage and musicians who show up because I asked nice. That's the real wealth.”
The other wealth, he'll tell you if you let him, is his wife — the one person, by every account, who has never once fallen for the bit. She shows up to the galas, stands next to him for the photo, and lets him have the last word, which friends say is its own kind of miracle.
Which gets you, eventually, to the song… Nobody claims to have written it. Everybody knows it. It shows up at the end of every gig, once someone's had a beer too many and somebody's using a trumpet mute as a microphone:
He's flown around the world on a plane, He's settled revolutions in Spain, the north pole he has charted, but wouldn't have parted with you.
“I didn't write that,” Muccioli says, and for one rare moment sounds almost sincere. “I've never settled a revolution anywhere and I've definitely never seen the north pole. But they sing it every gig, and I let them, because it's the closest thing I've got to a paycheck.”
He backs the Gulfstream out, clips a garbage can, keeps talking through it. “Twenty years of talking people into showing up for nothing,” he says. “That's not a nonprofit. That's a personality disorder with a 501(c)(3) attached.” Then he's out and headed for the Woodshed, already shouting about who's covering the trumpet part tonight. It won't be him. He's got an interview to finish.
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