by Nate Chinen
Several years earlier, the shortlist in that category had included the AACM trumpeter and composer Wadada Leo Smith, for an album called Ten Freedom Summers, inspired by key moments in the civil rights movement. Smith continued to create large-scale works addressing graspable themes, like the political meaning of the national parks system. He was another elder to emulate, as much for the self-reliant integrity of his approach as for the intrepid sonic dimensions of his art.
George Lewis, a trombonist, composer, and pioneering electronic musician belonging to the AACM’s second wave, published a definitive account of the organization in 2008: A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music. Lewis’s commanding show of scholarship—part musicological, part sociohistorical, part theoretical—framed the organization’s contributions in a way that made it far easier to comprehend from the outside. Meanwhile, he was working on the inside—as tenured faculty in the music department at Columbia University, where his doctoral protégés in composition included category-exploding composer-improvisers like the alto saxophonist Steve Lehman and the drummer Tyshawn Sorey.
While not technically members of the AACM, these musicians were indelibly shaped by its methodologies. It was impossible to disentangle the association’s influence on an album like Travail, Transformation and Flow, which Lehman created for an octet anchored by Sorey, using compositional techniques that put a premium on microtonal shadow and spectral overtone. That album, which Lehman released on Pi Recordings, sounded both familiar and alien, like a warped transmission from a solar nebula; it was one of the most forward-thinking jazz albums of 2009.
The landscape is crowded with other prominent examples of musicians inspired and mentored by a free-thinking constituency of artists, hardly restricted to the AACM. Your survey could begin with Craig Taborn, a conjuror of deep acoustical epiphanies, responsible for one of the revelatory solo piano recitals of our age, Avenging Angel, and one of the defining piano trio albums, Chants. Or Nicole Mitchell, a flutist and composer putting improvisation in focused dialogue with dystopian science fiction, nonwestern folk music, and postmodern dance. Or Mike Reed, a drummer and composer with a taste for postbop polyphony as well as a free-form textural scrawl. Or Kris Davis, a pianist with a judicious yet probing attack and a three-dimensional approach to free improvisation.
In this way, the ascendance of a class of jazz elders like Shorter, like Threadgill, like Motian—not guardians of a language so much as explorers in sound and space—rippled outward, redrawing the state of the art. Those coming up behind them could see myriad examples of artists working across dialect, genre, and medium, while still belonging to the fold.
Jack DeJohnette, Made in Chicago (ECM)
Paul Motian, I Have the Room Above Her (ECM)
Wayne Shorter, Footprints Live! (Verve)
Wadada Leo Smith, Ten Freedom Summers (Cuneiform)
Henry Threadgill’s Zooid, In for a Penny, In for a Pound (Pi)
6
Gangsterism on a Loop
Jason Moran took an unorthodox route to his gig at the Three Deuces. His coordinates were off by about seventy years and more than four thousand miles.
In its original incarnation, the Three Deuces was an anchor of Swing Street, the famously bustling nightlife corridor on Fifty-Second Street, between Fifth and Seventh Avenues in Manhattan. An epicenter for swing and bebop in the 1930s and ’40s, the street holds an enduring place in jazz lore, on record and in film. One iconic photograph by William P. Gottlieb, titled Automobiles Parked on a Rainy Night on 52nd Street, New York City, depicts a beckoning tableau of brownstone awnings and bold signage, neon letters ablaze in the dark.
Gottlieb also shot action portraits of many important musicians in the clubs on Fifty-Second Street, including more than a few at the Three Deuces, where the stage was bracketed by a folding set of tufted panels. A photograph from 1947 shows the drummer Max Roach wedged into a closetlike corner of that stage: His lips are slightly parted in a grin, and his eyes roll up slightly toward the pressed-tin ceiling. The drumstick in his right hand is caught in mid-stroke, a blur.
Moran had seen this image. Something about it stuck with him—the way that Roach, one of the most politically outspoken artists of his time, seemed literally shoved into that space, flanked by padded walls designed to muffle his sound. “I saw the photograph of Max with those grommets behind him,” Moran said, “and I just stared at it. What is this corner? What is this fucking corner?”1
A pianist-composer with an inquisitive streak and a compulsion for drawing connections across style and medium, Moran was more than casually interested in the implications here. Around the time that he fixated on Gottlieb’s photograph, he was already forming some thoughts about the physical spaces that had helped shape jazz history—spaces that, over time, often fade into an intangible abstraction. “Usually when I’m listening to old music, I’m listening to the music,” he said. “I’m not listening to the room. They don’t exist anymore, so how can you uncover some of the answers that might be in that music by trying to unearth the stage that it happened on?”2
This line of speculation led Moran to conceive STAGED, an installation and performance piece included in the 2015 Venice Biennale. Officially Moran’s first solo foray into the contemporary art world, this prestigious commission echoed his longtime track record as a collaborator with visual artists like Glenn Ligon, Stan Douglas, and Lorna Simpson. His other commitment at that year’s Biennale was with his closest partner from that milieu, the venerable performance artist Joan Jonas, who presented a large-scale multimedia installation at the American Pavilion.
Moran created STAGED at the urging of the Nigerian-born curator Okwui Enwezor, for the Biennale’s 56th International Art Exhibition. At its core, the work was a mythical evocation of the Three Deuces and another storied jazz room, the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. Moran pored over archival photographs and historical documents, and then enlisted fabricators to create two sculptural reconstructions: a golden-hued, curvaceous Savoy bandstand and a boxy, upholstered Three Deuces stage. He placed the two hulking sets some distance apart in a vast gallery space, like strangers at a party.
But he also made sure they “spoke” to each other, by way of an ambient soundtrack playing from both locales, at regular intervals. Moran had composed one part of this sonic loop, “He Cares,” as a minor-key piano reverie spiked with samples, like the clank and heave of a prison chain gang—a haunting, disembodied meditation on the African-American work song. Another sonic element involved a Steinway Spirio digital player piano programmed to play “All Hammers and Chains,” a startling étude that revolves around a hard rumble of glissandi up and down the keys. In this sense Moran’s touch and temperament were physically present in the exhibition even when he wasn’t.
Months after the Venice Biennale, Moran brought STAGED to Luhring Augustine Bushwick, the Brooklyn outpost of the contemporary gallery that represents him. The installation was on display during the summer of 2016, making it possible for visitors of any background to stroll in and pore over the details in the work, like an African-meets-art-deco pattern on the backdrop for the Savoy sculpture. (Moran had sourced the pattern from a vendor selling fabrics from Holland. “So it’s got that tension on it,” he said, chuckling. “African textiles from the colonial mother.”3)
Along the perimeter of the gallery, Moran had displayed a few smaller recent works he had made, including The Temple (for Terry Adkins), a found-art sculpture made of weathered temple blocks, and Basin Street 1 and 2, two charcoal-on-paper pieces that evoked both stride piano rolls and ancient biblical scrolls. In the gallery’s reception area, Moran had stocked a glass vitrine with artifacts for sale: old sheet music, salvaged drink menus, rickety hat stands. Luhring Augustine was also selling the first copies of LOOP, a limited-edition art zine he had edited, with contributions from a number of his musical peer
s and two mentors, Steve Coleman and Cassandra Wilson.
Several times during the exhibition, Moran performed live in the gallery, leading the Bandwagon, his longtime trio with Tarus Mateen on bass and Nasheet Waits on drums. At one of these special appearances, on a Saturday afternoon in July, the musicians climbed onto the Three Deuces bandstand as if reporting for duty. Waits sat behind a vintage drum kit, stocked with woodblocks and wafer-thin cymbals. Mateen picked up the double bass that had been lying on its side, part of the scenery. The musicians were in contemporary attire; Moran wore a polka-dot dress shirt, sneakers, and a baseball cap.
Their performance began with a long improvisation in dialogue with one of Moran’s spliced samples, of a female voice singing a gospel moan. They made this into a prayerful dirge, rustling quiet in a ceremonial free tempo, and then building a fervent arc. The remainder of the forty-five-minute set suggested a digest of themes from across Moran’s career, as well as a reflection on the endless renewal of the jazz tradition.
So the trio played “Body and Soul,” a standard ballad no doubt performed thousands of times on the actual Three Deuces stage. Moran’s arrangement of the song, a staple of his set lists, assumed a gluey R&B cadence, making a vamp out of one ascending phrase (“I’m all for you”) and the resolution that always brings it home (“Body and soul”).
Next up was “Wig Wise,” a sharp-cornered tune by Duke Ellington, from the early-sixties album Money Jungle, which featured Roach and the bassist Charles Mingus. The Bandwagon played it with the same antic sputter as on Moran’s second album, Facing Left—before giving the tune a rattling Afrobeat cadence. This in turn provided the segue into a pair of 1920s standards associated with Fats Waller (“Sheik of Araby” and “I Found a New Baby”) followed by the staccato Monk theme “Thelonious.”
The closing number began with “Wind,” a somber new original conceived for a large-scale commission. Moran morphed its melody into another of his recent inventions, “Study No. 6,” fixating at one point on a single note, and letting its overtones hang in the air. The trio hovered in this zone for a while, before Moran shifted yet again, into the pointillist agitation of “Reanimation,” a piece he’d written for Jonas.
Throughout the set, most of the audience sat on the concrete floor. A small child giggled as she scampered about the room. The Bandwagon made no obvious nod or concession to the idea of the Three Deuces as a historical locus; because of the enormous effort that had gone into creating the artwork itself, those implications were self-evident. So the musicians were free. They didn’t need to sound like anything other than themselves, letting the past flow through just as it always does.
* * *
—
Moran grew up in ideal circumstances for a jazz musician of interdisciplinary ambitions. He was born and raised in Houston, Texas, specifically the vibrant African-American neighborhood called Pleasantville. This was in the Third Ward, southeast of downtown, which would later be celebrated as a cradle of influence (among other things) for the Knowles sisters, Beyoncé and Solange.
By anyone’s standard, the Morans were serious about culture. Jason’s father, an investment banker, had a collection of some ten thousand albums, spanning rock, pop, and soul as well as jazz. Jason’s mother was an amateur cellist who taught deaf and at-risk children before opening a bakery; she enrolled him for piano lessons at age six, and often stood over his shoulder as an enforcer while he practiced his Suzuki method, scribbling notes. Because there was art everywhere in the house, Moran would always have something interesting in his field of vision as he played—he remembers one hyper-detailed image by the muralist John T. Biggers,4 who had been founding chairman of the art department at Houston’s Texas State University for Negroes (later renamed Texas Southern University). His family frequented art museums, the symphony, and the ballet. (They were also into recreational sports: golf, tennis, basketball. And Moran, like his two brothers, spent some adolescent years fairly obsessed with skateboarding.)
Not every jazz musician has a conversion story, a road-to-Damascus moment that later becomes a cornerstone of his or her narrative. Moran does. He was thirteen, going through a phase where the piano, with all of its classical baggage, had come to embody pure drudgery. He walked into a room in his house to find his parents watching news footage of a plane crash. They knew someone who’d been on the plane. The television was muted, and the only sound in the room was coming over the stereo: Thelonious Monk’s “ ’Round Midnight.” Moran had what he would later call an epiphany. “It was all the commentary they seemed to need,” he said, “the sound of loss and despair.”5
It’s telling that this recollection plays out as a dramatic moment with an expressive soundtrack—a scene from a film, in effect. But there was also something inherent in the music that suddenly clicked for him. “ ’Round Midnight” is a ballad whose ubiquity in the jazz literature can make it hard to see properly. Its solemn severity, a function of chordal architecture, is also integral to the emotional content of the song. At the hands of Monk, who had a plangent attack at the piano, articulate in ways that mostly fell outside classical orthodoxy, the song can communicate a devastating stoicism. Something about the attitude in the playing also struck Moran as contemporary, in secret dialogue with the hip-hop he was absorbing while away from the piano.
Moran became a Monk obsessive, pulling albums from his father’s collection and amassing others. His audition for the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts—a magnet known for turning out talent of all types (again, Beyoncé)—revolved around a Monk tune, “Ruby, My Dear.”
Over the next few years, Moran thrived at HSPVA, under the guidance of a legendary jazz educator, Dr. Robert Morgan. The perpetual abundance of talent at the school made it a competitive environment: during his first year, Moran didn’t even play in a school ensemble, because there were too many good pianists in the pool. But Moran formed natural alliances with a handful of advanced peers, notably the drummer Eric Harland, who would later play on his first album and draft him into Charles Lloyd’s New Quartet.
By his senior year, Moran was student director of the elite school combo. He graduated in 1993, moving to New York for conservatory training. More to the point, he matriculated at the Manhattan School of Music for the express purpose of studying with Jaki Byard, a pianist of abundant wit, brash dexterity, and a broad, nonideological grasp of jazz history. Byard had worked prominently with Mingus, in a role that showcased both his fluency with the codes of bebop and his adroitness with 1930s stride piano. Moran was one of his many students who absorbed a deep reverence for stride, along with the conviction that its ebullient intricacies needn’t be something trapped in amber.
The cloistered nature of the academy didn’t agree with Moran’s sensibilities, so he sought stimulation elsewhere. One day, early in the first semester of his second year, he trekked down to SoHo for a site-specific performance by Cecil Taylor. It had been commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum, and Taylor’s collaborator for the occasion was the Japanese dancer Min Tanaka, who’d expanded his formal palette from a strict foundation in Butoh. A block of Mercer Street had been closed to traffic, and Taylor and Tanaka performed to an audience of several hundred people, who crowded the sidewalk. Moran stood on a fire hydrant to watch.6 As aesthetic practice, this moment was an eye-opener, a model for how to engage with sound and space in new and unrestricted ways. (When Taylor performed again with Tanaka in 2016, as part of a residency at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Moran was once again in the audience.)
Word always gets around in New York jazz circles, and before Moran was out of school he had been hired by the alto saxophonist Greg Osby, one of the leading postbop modernists on the scene. Osby’s quartet quickly became one of the must-hear new bands in New York, and Moran, whose playing radiated both spikiness and soul, was a big reason for that. There’s a great, unfiltered document of the band made by Osby himself, using a
minidisc recorder placed on a table near the stage, at the Greenwich Village club Sweet Basil in 1997.
This recording opens with one original, a noir aria called “13th Floor,” and from there it ducks seamlessly through a series of jazz standards, like “Pent-Up House,” by Sonny Rollins, and “Big Foot,” by Charlie Parker. Osby liked this material so much—as an honest dispatch from the band’s latest coordinates—that he insisted it be released on Blue Note, despite the bootleggish sound quality and the fact that his previous studio album had been released only a few months prior. He worked out an angle: the label titled the album Banned in New York, and sold it at a discount price. The cover art and insert were hand-drawn like a DIY punk flyer, and the credits disclosed only that music had been recorded at “an undisclosed New York City entertainment establishment.”
The Osby-Moran alliance branched into other areas, like New Directions, a special-edition band that Blue Note put together in ’99. Part of a brand extension for the label, it featured Osby as the scout leader of a group of serious younger players, including the vibraphonist Stefon Harris, Moran’s roommate in Harlem at the time. The group mostly played retooled classics from the Blue Note catalog. Moran was responsible for four arrangements, including one of Horace Silver’s “Song for My Father,” which tinkered not only with the shape of the melody but also with the iconic vamp, familiar to both jazz insiders and fans of seventies FM rock (via “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” by Steely Dan). In Moran’s update, the buoyancy of the vamp was intact, but it gently assumed oblong phrase lengths, leaving the impression of someone tiptoeing gingerly into a darkened room.