Playing Changes

by Nate Chinen

  But it was an original, “Commentary on Electrical Switches,” that most directly augured Moran’s path to come. He dedicated this impressionistic ballad to Byard, who had died under mysterious circumstances just as New Directions was hitting the road. The song, which finds Moran in compassionate triologue with Waits and Mateen, is a fascinating document in retrospect—the earliest premonition of the Bandwagon, as it were. And even here, on a track that’s over in less than three minutes, they already sound quite a bit like a band.

  Speaking by phone while on the tour at the time, Moran praised Waits and Mateen for their knack, as a unit, for keeping him on his toes. And he took a particular pride in the band’s way of spinning a nightclub set into a continuous fabric, a strategy that Osby had introduced. “We’ll finish a piece and start to fade away, and then somebody will take over and play a solo to lead us into the next tune,” he said. “It’s very slick. It’s like somebody with two turntables, mixing in the next song.”

  Moran, then twenty-four, hadn’t yet released his debut album. But he knew that the wind was in his sails, and expressed a clear determination to honor the example of some of his heroes: Monk and Byard, and two other pianists he’d studied with privately, Muhal Richard Abrams and Andrew Hill. These were composer-improvisers whose common denominator was an artistic independence rooted in originality. They were also the kinds of musical thinkers who refused to stay put in whatever box had been drawn around them.

  “You can listen to Andrew Hill and tell he’s been listening to a whole bunch of crazy stuff,” Moran said. “He listens to Hungarian chants and all types of stuff every day. There was a time when he didn’t listen to music for about a year. So those people are obviously open to way more concepts and ways of thinking than the average musician. And I don’t want to be the average musician. I want to be the man who, fifty, sixty, a hundred years from now, you’re like: ‘Man, he was really on another level. He was trying to come at it from a different perspective.’ ”7

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  Soundtrack to Human Motion was released one month after that conversation, in April 1999. It opens with a sinuous postbop waltz that owes a slight, superficial resemblance to Hill’s music. But this impression may have something to do with the instrumentation: as in New Directions, Moran works on the album with Osby and Harris, in a format that recalls some of Hill’s work on Blue Note. The melancholy sound of the tune was a matter of both atmosphere and melodic contour, and Moran had given it an intriguing title: “Gangsterism on Canvas.”

  This was an allusion to the downtown artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose 1983 painting Hollywood Africans includes the word “GANGSTERISM.”—all caps, with a period—near the lower edge of the frame. The painting gathers an accumulation of old African-American stereotypes in the movies, along with a dash of autobiography: Basquiat inserted caricatures of himself and two creative peers, in a stick-figure shorthand. The text on the canvas evokes both Cy Twombly and urban street writing, a point that Moran later underscores. Another track on his album bears the title “JAMO Meets SAMO”—a convergence of Moran’s nickname and a Basquiat-affiliated graffiti tag.

  There were other signifiers in Moran’s track listing, including an allusion to kung fu fighting technique; part of a Ravel piano suite; and “Retrograde,” a tune he’d devised by playing a recording of Hill’s “Smokestack” backwards on a turntable. Then of course there was the larger idea presented by the album’s title: a soundtrack, but one with kinetic intentions. (You could track this idea through the titles of two other pieces on the album: “Still Moving” and “Kinesics.”) The end result, in any case, garnered high praise: in The New York Times, Ben Ratliff selected it as his album of the year.

  Moran was just getting started. Facing Left, in 2000, featured Mateen and Waits, formally putting the trio’s rubbery, push-pull eloquence on display. That album’s track listing is also telling, calculatedly so. “Wig Wise” and another Ellington composition, “Later,” appear along with an art-pop ballad by Björk (“Jöga”) and pieces of film scores (including the main theme to Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo). There’s also a tune by Byard, and a reprise of sorts: the album closes with “Gangsterism on Wood,” a cousin to “Gangsterism on Canvas,” rendered as a chiming solo piano rumination in largely free tempo.

  This was the first indication of a leitmotif: Moran would include some variation on the “Gangsterism” theme on more than half a dozen albums, tweaking the titles as well as the arrangements. The piece functioned as a dynamic through line, a reminder that for all the relentless forward motion in his music, Moran was embarked on a project whose mission had been articulated from the jump.

  “Gangsterism on a River,” for instance, from the 2001 album Black Stars, spread out the theme in slow, dirgelike common time. That title neatly communicated a sense of drift, but it was also a play on words—“River” as in Sam Rivers, the august tenor saxophonist and flutist whose presence gave the album its raison d’être. A gruffly exuberant searcher who had made some important albums in the sixties, and been a linchpin of the loft scene thereafter, Rivers represented a bridge to a previous avant-garde generation. The success of the meeting reflected well on both the elder statesman and the young turk, serving notice that the language was alive and in trustworthy hands.

  Moran made this point even more explicit on his first solo piano album, Modernistic, released the following year. While largely a collection of original compositions, it opens with a James P. Johnson stride number, “You’ve Got to Be Modernistic,” whose title doubles in context as a manifesto. As if to answer that call, Moran goes on to introduce his slow-jam remake of “Body and Soul” and a smart, clattering evocation of an early hip-hop touchstone, Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock”—the latter with a beat hammered out on a prepared piano, and a melodic transcription of the song’s rapped cadences. There was more: a streamlined Schumann lied; an invention by Muhal Richard Abrams; “Gangsterism on Irons” and “Gangsterism on a Lunchtable,” two more in a series; a sort of lullaby to close, called “Gentle Shifts South.”

  If there had been any question about Moran’s drive to broaden the framework for jazz performance—in terms of materials, historical purview, and personal expression—Modernistic settled the issue decisively. Gary Giddins spoke for the emerging consensus when he declared it “one of the most rigorously unpredictable and rewarding solo piano albums in years.”8

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  The Bandwagon, meanwhile, was growing into its stride, becoming at once a more turbulent and more fluent proposition. Their set lists would bounce from Brahms to Byard to Bambaataa without judgment or pause. This was a strategy far from standard in jazz at the time, and less of a commonplace than it would soon become, with the ubiquity of digital playlists and streaming services. What it suggested at the time was the precedent of hip-hop, and in particular the moves of a crate-digging deejay with an urge to mix it up. Hip-hop was a lingua franca for Moran and his bandmates, notably Mateen, who had close affiliations with the Atlanta rap royalty Outkast and Goodie Mob. So it made as much sense for the Bandwagon to “sample” a piece like “Planet Rock” (which was in turn built on a sample, of Kraftwerk’s “Trans-Europe Express”) as it did to refurbish a 1930s Ellington tune.

  Around the time that Moran made Modernistic, he put together a minidisc recording that functioned as the Bandwagon’s introduction, a jump-cut collage of sampled sounds. A Bartók chorus collided with a Robert Johnson blues, which in turn led to spoken-word fragments by, among others, the actor John Gielgud and Minister Elijah Muhammad. (Also in the mix were Moran, Waits, and Mateen themselves, in heated exchange.) The track concluded with a flourish: the Queens rapper Cormega, in his 2002 track “The Legacy,” spitting “the bandwagon,” spliced on repeat.

  This was the triumphant overture for the Bandwagon’s inaugural booking at the Village Vanguard, Thanksgiving week of 2002. As o
ften happens with a Vanguard debut, an air of reverence was almost palpable on opening night, as Moran, in an overcoat and fedora, strode onstage. (“I’m not fronting; I’m cold,” he said, chuckling, in reference to his attire. “It’s chilly up here.”) Then the group was off, racing into a tune called “Another One” with a precipitous and choppy propulsion. Later, attacking the Byard anthem “Out Front,” Moran and crew began in a stride cadence and then went crashing through a series of tempos, starting and stopping, restlessly shifting gears. It was a powerful demonstration of swing rhythm that never settles; there was a feeling of on-the-edge displacement even during the toe-tapping portions of the tune.

  Elsewhere in the set, something happened that I’ve seen at a handful of Moran performances over the years: his tactics startled the audience, and it seemed for a moment as if he might elude them. The source of this mystification was a piece called “Ringing My Phone (Straight Outta Istanbul),” which featured a sampled phone conversation between two women in Turkish. What was so disorienting about the sample, beyond its incomprehensibility to non-Turkish speakers, was the fact that Moran had harnessed the material not as an accent or supplement, but rather a compositional blueprint: the trio matched the cadence and tonality of the conversation, essentially note for note. The resulting performance was serpentine and syntactically complex—but also somehow free-flowing and organic, tied as it was to human speech. During its unveiling, the piece met with a sharp, collective intake of breath, but ultimately provoked an exhilarated round of applause.

  “Ringing My Phone (Straight Outta Istanbul)” appears on The Bandwagon, an album culled from recordings of that first Vanguard engagement. (Another track, “Infospace,” applies a similar conceit to a Chinese stock report.) The album also documents some of the staples of Moran’s set list at the time, like a full-band version of “Gentle Shifts South” featuring snippets of conversational reflection by his grandparents.

  Months after the gig, and not long before the release of the album, I visited Moran at the Harlem apartment he shared with his future wife and creative collaborator, the mezzo-soprano Alicia Hall. (They had gotten engaged during the Vanguard run, on Thanksgiving.) Sinking into a black leather Arne Jacobsen chair, Moran described the evolution of the Bandwagon’s internal combustion. “It’s gotten stronger, but at the same time stayed real loose,” he said. “Once we really started to play together, we realized how much we could do with dynamics, how much we could do with time, how much we could do with cues within the music. And how much we could do with repertoire, as far as changing what the jazz repertoire is. We had a lot to say about that, because we all listen to so much different music that it would be silly to keep ourselves confined to playing Thelonious Monk’s music or Tommy Flanagan’s arrangements. We wanted to take it where we thought it could go.”9

  Where it went would naturally morph and mutate a number of times in the ensuing years. Same Mother, a vibrant album from 2005, signaled Moran’s head-first engagement with Delta blues: the Bandwagon briefly became a four-piece with the addition of Marvin Sewell, a versatile guitarist he’d gotten to know years earlier, in Cassandra Wilson’s band.

  By the time the Bandwagon released Ten—the marker of a decade’s work, in 2010—the album landed as a kind of event. A product of sturdy intelligence and untroubled confidence, it put the band’s interplay in a center spotlight, as a model of lithe collectivism. Moran’s piano, as always, forms the core of the album, but its sound is inconceivable without Mateen’s nimble, nubby bass guitar playing, or the earthy mutability of Waits’s way with rhythm. There are pieces on the album by each of Moran’s major totems of pianism: Monk (“Crepuscule with Nellie”), Byard (“To Bob Vatel of Paris”), and Hill (“Play to Live,” a co-creation). There’s also an interrogation of a player-piano piece by Conlon Nancarrow, and a piece composed by Leonard Bernstein for the Jerome Robbins ballet Fancy Free.

  The album also features a ballet theme of Moran’s own invention: “Pas de Deux—Lines Ballet,” a sternly gleaming ballad for solo piano. Elsewhere there are pieces commissioned by a jazz festival and an art museum, and one conceived as the soundtrack to a documentary film. Each feels shaped by the practices of the trio rather than imposed from the outside, with a style governed by the full sweep of the jazz tradition, and by hip-hop, blues, and gospel besides. The radiant, authentic sweep of the album was such that it almost seemed a premonition: later that year, Moran became a MacArthur Fellow, at thirty-five.

  The far-ranging interests that set Moran in a class apart, at least among his jazz peers, hardly represented a stretch for him. As far back as 2003 he was talking about an idea he had for a grant proposal for the Bandwagon: a durational piece called “Storefront,” in which he would lease a space for a month and occupy it, as a place of business, every day. “So we go hang out there, and whether we play music or watch TV, there will be seats set up so people can come in. And maybe a couple of nights out of the week there will be free concerts. And artists will be welcome to come in and interact.”

  Part installation, part community outreach, and part performance art, the idea jibed perfectly with Moran’s creative conception. Yet he was matter-of-fact about it: “I just think this is a way to bring the art out,” he said. “It’s always about exposing the art, and creating it at the same time.”10

  “Storefront” didn’t come to fruition in that exact form, but it had a strong parallel in BLEED—a five-day museum residency that he and Alicia Hall Moran organized in 2012, as part of that year’s Whitney Biennial. It featured dozens of collaborators, including the guitarist Bill Frisell, the choreographer Rashida Bumbray, and, searingly, the artist Kara Walker, in a sort of performance drag as “Karaoke Walkrrr.” The residency put into formal terms a sort of intuitive process that the Morans had situated at the center of their creative life: community and family, interdisciplinary collaboration, the transformation of materials and environment.

  In time Moran would find ways of bringing this feeling even to more normative jazz settings—like the Village Vanguard, whose eightieth birthday celebration he curated in 2015. Those weeklong festivities included an evening of solo piano, featuring Moran alongside a peer, Ethan Iverson, and several elders: Kenny Barron, Stanley Cowell, and Fred Hersch. The Bandwagon served one night as accompaniment for contemporary poets (Elizabeth Alexander and Yusef Komunyakaa) and the next as a backdrop to comedians (Marina Franklin, David Alan Grier, Keith Robinson). On another evening, Moran and company presented a commission inspired by the quilt makers of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, with Hall Moran on vocals and Frisell on guitar. The week ended with a rare club appearance by the Charles Lloyd New Quartet, and Lloyd, who hadn’t played the Vanguard in nearly forty years, sounded radiant and right at home.

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  Some of the generosity and connectedness inherent in Moran’s approach to art-making could be sussed out in an album he released in 2006, titled Artist in Residence. Made up of selections from several large commissioned works, it was the first organized statement to frame Moran as not only a pianist and composer but also a fluent traveler in the realm of contemporary art. The centerpiece of the album, in many ways, is a track called “Artists Ought to Be Writing,” which hinges on remarks by the artist, conceptualist, and philosopher Adrian Piper. The text, from a documentary film called Other Than Art’s Sake 1973–74, appears in a sampled and lightly spliced form:

  Artists ought to be writing about what they do, and what kinds of procedures they go through to realize a work, what their presuppositions in making the work are, and related things. If artists’ intentions and ideas were more accessible to the general public I think it might break down some of the barriers of misunderstanding between the art world and artists and the general public. I think it would become clear the extent to which artists are just as much a product of their society as anyone else, as in any other kinds of vocation.

  Moran’s scoring o
f this text inserts pauses and imposes cadences, but it respects the integrity of Piper’s speech patterns. His most meaningful underlining occurs around the words “break down,” which he imbues with a synchronized chordal fillip. If you’ve been listening to the album in sequence, you experience a blush of recognition: Artist in Residence opens with a track called “Break Down,” which samples those two words, in Piper’s voice, as a repetitive hook. There’s more than one kind of break to be broken down here. And Moran, in reframing the comments in a stylish contemporary casing, seems to be doing some of the very work that Piper prescribes, if only from a kind of side door.

  For a large-scale piece called In My Mind: Monk at Town Hall, 1959, commissioned by Duke University, Moran researched Monk’s birthplace in North Carolina, making ambient field recordings at the plantation where the composer’s great-grandfather had been a slave. The performance featured this found audio footage along with related footage by a video artist. Thanks to the research of Sam Stephenson, then a scholar at Duke, Moran also had access to fly-on-the-wall recordings of Monk and the arranger Hall Overton rehearsing a big band for the original concert at Town Hall. The sound of Monk’s footfalls on the floorboards became a structural element: his clomping dance step, like a shuffling Clydesdale, leads into an arrangement of “Little Rootie Tootie,” setting the pace for a stuttering recast of the tune.

  In 2011 Moran became an artistic advisor for jazz at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, and within a few years, he took full ownership as artistic director for jazz. The significance of his assuming this post—originated by Dr. Billy Taylor, of “America’s Classical Music” decree—probably can’t be overstated. Moran wasn’t necessarily opposed to programming with a traditionalist bent, but from the start he generated a kaleidoscopic range of programming, testing out at the institutional level an aesthetic ideal that had already proven compelling in his own work.