Jason Moran

Jason Moran entered the recording studio as a bandleader for the first time in 1999 with Soundtrack to Human Motion, his Blue Note debut. The jazz pianist and composer fused immaculate execution with longstanding jazz heritage while drawing additional stimulus from classical repertoire, blues forms, funk grooves, hip-hop beats, rock textures, and visual-arts concepts. Reviewers quickly hailed him as “the next big thing,” a judgment that proved accurate: Moran has since established himself among the most consequential and forward-thinking pianists in jazz. On Facing Left, issued in 2000, he first presented the Bandwagon, the enduring trio completed by bassist Tarus Mateen and drummer Nasheet Waits, and the group delivered an arresting selection of material drawn from disparate origins. The 2002 solo album Modernistic examined twentieth-century rhythmic practices through interpretations of boogie-woogie, classical pieces, avant-jazz, and funk. Artist in Residence, released in 2006 and featuring guitarist Marvin Sewell, reconsidered the emotional and stylistic breadth of the blues. In 2010 Moran issued Ten and received a MacArthur Foundation Genius grant. All Rise: A Joyful Elegy for Fats Waller, which appeared in 2013, originated several years earlier as a commissioned theatrical production in which bassist/vocalist/arranger Meshell Ndegeocello served as his central collaborator. Moran wrote the soundtrack for Ava Duvernay’s landmark 2014 film Selma. In 2018 he released Looks of a Lot and Music for Joan Jonas, the latter documenting a studio partnership with the performance artist. The same year, the touring exhibition Jason Moran opened at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and gathered much of his cross-disciplinary output. In 2021 he recorded Let My People Go, a sequence of duets with veteran saxophonist Archie Shepp, and the solo album The Sound Will Tell You.

Moran entered the world in Houston, Texas, in 1975. His father worked as an investment banker and his mother as a schoolteacher; together they nurtured his artistic outlook by taking him to Houston Symphony concerts and to the city’s numerous museums and galleries, where they also acquired works of art. At six he began classical piano instruction through the Suzuki method, yet his father’s extensive record library—thousands of LPs spanning blues, jazz, Motown, classical, and gospel—exerted comparable influence. As a teenager Moran gravitated toward hip-hop and skateboarding. At thirteen he first heard Thelonious Monk’s “‘Round Midnight,” an encounter that permanently altered his emerging musical landscape. He initially sensed little contradiction between hip-hop and Monk’s aesthetic, an insight that later informed his approach to All Rise. The young listener found Monk’s nursery-rhyme-like melodies straightforward and drew parallels between the pianist’s use of space and rhythmic ingenuity and the inventive beat-making and production techniques of hip-hop. Moran attended Houston’s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, where he studied in Robert Morgan’s jazz program; during his final year he directed the school’s jazz combo and performed in the all-state high-school jazz ensemble, graduating in 1993.

He continued his studies at the Manhattan School of Music, working with pianist and composer Jaki Byard and earning a bachelor’s degree in music in 1997. While still an undergraduate he was asked to join saxophonist Greg Osby’s band for a European tour after a single conversation about the jazz piano tradition; Osby subsequently retained him for further performances. Moran’s first appearance on record occurred on Osby’s 1997 Blue Note album Further Ado. He went on to tour and record with the saxophonist on such notable releases as the live Banned in New York, Zero, and Friendly Fire, the last co-billed with Joe Lovano. Osby also introduced Moran to Muhal Richard Abrams and Andrew Hill; those encounters proved decisive, supplying ideas the pianist absorbed through direct dialogue. He signed with Blue Note in early 1998 and recorded Soundtrack to Human Motion with Osby and vibraphonist Stefon Harris in a quintet completed by drummer Eric Harland and bassist Lonnie Plaxico. The 1999 album consisted entirely of originals, among them “Gangsterism on Canvas,” inspired by the life and work of painter Jean-Michel Basquiat; that piece later anchored a series of similarly titled compositions throughout Moran’s career. Critics praised the record uniformly for its writing and expansive pianism.

Facing Left appeared in 2000. Named after an Egon Schiele painting, it marked the first recording by the Bandwagon trio. The program mixed Moran and Mateen originals with two little-known Duke Ellington pieces, Jaki Byard’s “Twelve” (dedicated to the recently murdered mentor), Carmine Coppola’s “The Death of Don Fanucci,” Masaru Satô’s theme from Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, and a sensitive yet exploratory version of Björk’s “Joga.” Later that year the Bandwagon participated in Osby’s New Directions sextet date alongside saxophonist Mark Shim and Stefon Harris. Black Stars, a 2001 quartet session, featured saxophonist and flutist Sam Rivers as lead soloist and included seven Moran compositions plus works by Rivers, Ellington, and Byard. Moran next released the solo Modernistic in 2002, probing the development of twentieth-century rhythmic techniques via stride piano applied to originals and pieces by James P. Johnson, Robert Schumann, Muhal Richard Abrams, and Afrika Bambaataa; it reached number 19 on the Traditional Jazz Albums chart. The live 2003 album The Bandwagon presented the trio in concert with additional compositions by Mateen, Brahms, and Byard and climbed into the Jazz Albums Top Five.

Same Mother, issued in 2004, added guitarist Marvin Sewell to the Bandwagon; Sewell’s raw, emotionally charged playing enriched Moran’s investigation of jazz’s rhythmic lineage through the blues, even on classical-derived pieces such as the original “Aubade” and “Field of the Dead” (drawn from Sergey Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky). The album also offered striking readings of Mal Waldron’s “Fire Waltz” and Albert King’s “I’ll Play the Blues for You” and peaked inside the Jazz Albums Top 30. Artist in Residence, released in 2006, reunited Moran with Sewell for a markedly different project incorporating several museum-commissioned works. The opener “Break Down” employed looped vocals by conceptual artist and philosopher Adrian Piper, then in residence at the Walker Art Center; “Milestone” centered on one of Piper’s visual pieces and featured mezzo-soprano Alicia Hall Moran. The Shape, The Scent, The Feel of Things formed part of an existing installation by performance artist Joan Jonas, while “Rain” drew on African-American ring shouts. Trumpeter Ralph Alessi and Senegalese kora master Abdou Mboup also participated. In 2007 Moran assumed the piano chair in Charles Lloyd’s quartet, replacing Geri Allen, and remained through 2016. That year he also created In My Mind: Monk at Town Hall 1959, a multimedia work combining crafted and archival audio, newsreel footage, a new video by David Dempewolf, paintings by Glenn Ligon, and photographs by W. Eugene Smith. The piece incorporated Moran’s reharmonizations of Monk’s original big-band charts and later became the subject of a 2012 documentary film. Between its 2007 premiere and 2018 it received more than one hundred sold-out international performances. Moran was named a United States Artists Fellow in 2008 and joined Dave Holland’s quartet for a three-year touring engagement beginning in 2009.

In 2010 he joined the faculty of the New England Conservatory of Music and released Ten. Although the title commemorated a decade as a leader, the music looked ahead. Recorded with the Bandwagon, it featured originals such as “Blue Blocks,” commissioned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and “RFK in the Land of Apartheid,” written for a film about Robert Kennedy’s 1966 visit to South Africa; it also included a vigorous reading of Leonard Bernstein’s “Big Stuff,” “Feedback, Pt. 2” incorporating sampled feedback from Jimi Hendrix’s Woodstock performance, Byard’s “To Bob Vatel of Paris,” the ballad “Play to Live” co-composed with Andrew Hill, and two Monk pieces. The album spent twelve weeks on the Jazz Albums chart, peaking at number 11, and Moran received a MacArthur Foundation Genius grant at year’s end. In 2012 his ongoing collaboration with wife, singer and Broadway actress Alicia Hall Moran, yielded BLEED, a five-day live-music series for the Whitney Biennial that examined performance as a catalyst for questioning cultural and societal norms. Moran also participated in a residency at Birdland with Trio 3—Oliver Lake, Andrew Cyrille, and Reggie Workman—resulting in the 2013 Intakt album Refraction - Breakin’ Glass, credited to Trio 3 + Jason Moran. That same year he appeared on Hagar’s Song, a duo recording with Charles Lloyd, and issued All Rise: A Joyful Elegy for Fats Waller. The project began with a 2011 commission from the Harlem Stage Gatehouse for a live Waller tribute within its Harlem Jazz Shrines series. Moran’s conception integrated piano, vocal jazz supplied chiefly by collaborator and co-arranger Meshell Ndegeocello, and interpretive dance, using Waller’s songs as points of departure. During performances Moran wore an oversize papier-mâché mask of Waller’s head fashioned by Haitian artist Didier Civil. He titled the concert presentation The Fats Waller Dance Party, encouraging audience members to dance. The Blue Note recording adopted a comparable yet freshly contextualized stance that avoided nostalgia; Moran employed Rhodes and Wurlitzer electric pianos, Ndegeocello sang lead with backing chorus, rappers, and a funky horn section, all framed by thoroughly contemporary post-bop piano language. All Rise remained on the Jazz Albums chart for five weeks, reaching number seven, and marked Moran’s final Blue Note release.

In 2014 Moran became Artistic Director for Jazz at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. He composed the score for Ava Duvernay’s landmark film Selma, joined the roster of the Luhring Augustine gallery, and, with Alicia Hall Moran, founded Yes Records, whose inaugural release was Heavy Blue by Alicia Hall Moran, produced by her husband, who also played on two tracks. That year Moran served as the central figure in Luanda-Kinshasa, a six-hour looped film by Vancouver-based artist Stan Douglas depicting a fictional jazz-funk band recording an endless jam session inside a re-creation of Columbia’s legendary 30th Street studio. A limited-edition vinyl set was later drawn from the performance. Two years afterward Moran released the live solo album The Armory Concert, comprising all-original compositions created for the inaugural concert of the Artists Studio Series. In 2015 he presented Jason Moran STAGED, a mixed-media installation with sound for the Venice Biennale that featured interactive sculptural representations of two historic New York jazz-club stages—the Savoy Ballroom and the Three Deuces—symbolizing the swing era of the 1930s and the bebop/hard-bop period of the 1950s; the shifting musical content reflected the political, social, and economic conditions confronting African Americans before the Civil Rights era.

Moran issued the live solo outing The Armory Concert in 2016 and scored Duvernay’s documentary 13th. The following year he released Bangs, a trio date with guitarist Mary Halvorson and trumpeter Ron Miles, and MASS {Howl, eon}, the product of a real-time collaboration with painter Julie Mehretu. Shortly after the 2016 presidential election Mehretu began painting large murals at the Church of St. Thomas the Apostle in Harlem; Moran composed and recorded music inside the church, accompanied by Graham Haynes on cornet and electronics and Jamire Williams on drums. He also issued Thanksgiving at the Vanguard, a live Bandwagon recording from the previous year. In 2018 Moran undertook numerous multimedia projects. He created The Harlem Hellfighters: James Reece Europe and the Absence of Ruin, a multimedia performance with the Bandwagon and additional musicians chosen by Gary Crosby of Tomorrow’s Warriors, accompanied by film projections, which premiered at London’s Barbican Centre. He responded musically to Nick Cave’s video-projection work Untitled for the By the People Festival at Washington National Cathedral. He also composed music for Ta-Nehisi Coates’s staged reading of Between the World and Me. The year’s principal event, however, was the premiere of the touring exhibition Jason Moran, organized by the Walker Art Center. The show featured both STAGED installations plus a third depicting Slugs’ Saloon, the avant-jazz venue open from 1964 to 1972, and incorporated charcoal drawings and time-based media works arising from Moran’s long-term associations with visual artists Joan Jonas, Glenn Ligon, Julie Mehretu, and others; in-gallery performances and a substantial catalog accompanied the presentation. Moran returned to the Walker’s McGuire Theater to premiere the commissioned work The Last Jazz Fest. He also released two albums: Music for Joan Jonas, documenting three prior collaborations, and Looks of a Lot, commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and featuring the Bandwagon with the Kenwood Academy Band, saxophonist Ken Vandermark, and vocalists Katie Ernst and Theaster Gates. After extended showings at four major American museums, the exhibition closed at the Whitney in January 2020.

In February 2021 Moran and saxophonist Archie Shepp issued the duo album Let My People Go, comprising spirituals, standards, and covers, on the saxophonist’s Archieball label. In March The Sound Will Tell You appeared on Yes Records. The solo-piano recording was made over three days in January; half the pieces employed an effects filter called “DRIP” that lets sound cast a shadow, lending each note an additional gravitational dimension. These tracks carry subtitles—“tear,” “honey,” and “shadow”—and reflect the influence of Houston’s late DJ Screw, originator of the chopped-and-screwed technique. Several compositions were titled after works by Toni Morrison, the author Moran read most often during quarantine.