Jason Moran: Selma

Pianist and composer Jason Moran has established himself as a risk-taker and trendsetter for new directions in jazz. The Los Angeles Times hails Moran, “a startlingly gifted pianist with a relentless thirst for experimentation.” It’s that incomparable talent and unyielding drive towards innovation that earned Moran a prestigious MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship and the title of Kennedy Center Artistic Director for Jazz. In this moving program, Moran revisits his score for the Academy Award winning film Selma for piano and guitar plus orchestra. The film tells the story of a pivotal moment in US history, when in 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. helped to organize an anti-segregation march along the highway from Selma, Alabama to the state capital. Considered one of the nation’s great victories for organized protest, the march contributed to the passage of the Voting Rights act later that year. Performing the score live to the backdrop of the film, Moran’s music perfectly complements the scale of the story and leaves audiences “with evidence that they can actually go back into society and be part of the change” (Jason Moran, The Washington Post).

Jason Moran - The Harlem Hellfighters

Jason Moran: James Reese Europe and the Harlem Hellfighters: The Absence of Ruin

Composer, pianist, and visual artist Jason Moran reflects on the legacy of a hero of black music in a multidisciplinary program entitled, James Reese Europe and the Harlem Hellfighters: The Absence of Ruin. An iconic figure in the evolution of African-American music, ragtime pioneer, and World War I hero, James Reese Europe led a crack military ensemble called the Harlem Hellfighters. In addition to their achievements in combat, Europe and his Hellfighters popularized the new spirit of jazz in a war-torn French nation fascinated with black culture. And that’s only the beginning of their story – their legacy has had an extraordinary impact on African-American music over the past century of cultural and political change.

Moran’s innovative program features his Bandwagon bandmates – bassist Tarus Mateen and drummer Nasheet Waits – plus a seven-piece horn section, contributions from artist/writer/film director/screenwriter John Akomfrah, and visual materials from acclaimed cinematographer Bradford Young. It’s Moran’s response to Orlando Patterson’s concept of the “absence of ruin” – a musical monument to a vanishing African-American history. Of the US premiere, The Washington Post exclaims, “We already know that Jason Moran is stunningly and profoundly original, even in his treatment of existing material… Knowing it doesn’t prepare one for the stark, sublime beauty of ‘James Reese Europe and the Harlem Hellfighters: The Absence of Ruin.’”

James Reese Europe and the Absence of Ruin is co-commissioned by 14-18 NOW: WW1 Centenary Art Commissions, Berliner Festspiele / Jazzfest Berlin, Serious and the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, with support from the National Lottery through Arts Council England and the Heritage Lottery Fund, from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and from the Federal Agency for Civic Education, Germany.

For more information about this project, click here