IMN - International Music Network

31 year-old pianist Jason Moran has proven, after seven years on the estimable Blue Note Records, more than his brilliance as a performer. He’s established himself as a risk-taker, a seeker of new directions for jazz as a whole. Looking to the wider world of art for inspiration, Moran has found it in edgy 20th century painters like Jean-Michel Basquiat (check out “JAMO Meets SAMO” from Soundtrack to Human Motion, his 1999 debut as a leader, as well as his ongoing series of “Gangsterism” compositions), Egon Schiele (from whose painting entitled “Facing Left” Moran borrowed the title of his second album for Blue Note) and Robert Rauschenberg, whose chaotic refinement inspired Moran’s third album Black Stars, featuring the legendary Sam Rivers.

Artist In Residence is Moran’s seventh and most adventurous album to date. Unafraid of ambitious undertakings, Moran accepted—in the span of one year—three separate commissions from three different pre-eminent American arts institutions: The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Dia Art Foundation, and Jazz at Lincoln Center. The music created for these commissions was too outstanding to go unrecorded and so Moran went into the studio to recreate them with his band, The Bandwagon — Tarus Mateen on bass and Nasheet Waits on drums—and each of the guest artists who participated in the performances of these commissioned works.

The result speaks for itself Artist In Residence is a record of Moran’s most artistic exchanges and encounters to date on his true path in the Art World, and an original collage of his most ambitious compositions and reflections on art today.

Artist In Residence begins with “Break Down” from the larger work entitled Milestone, a musical-theatrical piece first performed at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. To celebrate the completion of its renovations and expansion in April 2005—in a style consistent with its international reputation as the leader in multidisciplinary arts programming—the Walker Art Center had named Moran an “Artist-in-Residence” and commissioned him to compose an evening-length work based on any aspect of the museum he wished. Moran chose a work by conceptual artist and philosopher Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being: I/You (Her).

“Break Down” is an uptempo take on a brief recorded narrative by Piper. Those familiar with Moran’s previous work will recognize its catchy reconfiguration-harmonization in the style of an earlier tune, “Straight Outta Istanbul: Ringing My Phone” (The Bandwagon, 2003). Another Milestone piece is “Artists Ought To Be Writing,” an extended riff on Piper’s salient reflections on the Art World at-large.

Next is the titlesong, “Milestone.” Written by Moran’s wife, the soprano Alicia Hall Moran, the song features her on vocals. Moran adds with respect: “We made a full-length theater piece out of an ordinary jazz concert, and Tarus, Nasheet, Marvin [Sewell] and I didn’t really know too much about stagecraft so we got a crash course from Alicia. She was the director and my collaborator as a writer. In Milestone I wanted us to play the part of ourselves almost, and bring the audience inside the heads of this band; show that while we’re up on stage and you’re looking at us, we’re involved in our own examination of you.”

“Milestone” is a heart beat straight from his marriage. “We wanted to have this love story that happens congruently with the music,” Moran explains. He adds: “Working together with Alicia is such a blessing. None of my work would be any good if she weren’t around.”

“Cradle Song,” by Julian Lloyd Webber, played an important role in Moran’s early education through the Suzuki piano method. As the track plays, we hear a pencil scribbling while Moran performs the piece unaccompanied. Moran recalls: “My mother would come to all my piano lessons to listen and take notes, and you could hear her pencil, loud. At one point I yelled at her to stop, and she did. I wanted to reveal this part of my history, as an aspect of how I play. My mother has passed away, and now I yearn for her to sit by and take notes. So the sound of the pencil is me writing a letter to her to tell her this.”

Another major commission captured on Artist In Residence is entitled The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things, a multimedia performance piece Moran developed over an intense 12 week period with video/performance artist Joan Jonas. Dia:Beacon—a new 300,000 square-foot museum in upstate New York for massive contemporary artworks—produced the piece. Moran composed, arranged, and performed a live solo piano sound landscape throughout the 90-minute-long abstract work’s debut performance (a repeat engagement is planned for October 2006).

“Joan is a pioneer in the video and performance art world,” says Moran. “Working with her was like working Wayne Shorter, or Cassandra Wilson.” “Refraction 1” is a duet with Moran on piano and Jonas herself on percussion. “Joan loves to make sound, whether it’s singing or touching objects,” says Moran. “We recorded this while looking at the accompanying video excerpt. Joan is playing an assortment of shakers, claves, toy cars, bells and even kabangers. It’s a great duet.” (“Refraction 2” is a full-band version of the piece.)

“Arizona Landscape,” for solo piano, speaks to Jonas’s main inspiration for the show: the writings of the German art historian Aby Warburg, particularly his study of the Pueblo Native American culture of the Southwest. “He puts on his coat and leaves,” also for solo piano, serves as exit music for the actor portraying Aby Warburg. He literally puts on his coat and leaves, walking across the expansive space of the Dia:Beacon.

The sextet piece RAIN is Moran’s inaugural commission from Jazz at Lincoln Center, and in addition to The Bandwagon it features Ralph Alessi on trumpet, Marvin Sewell on guitar, and Abdou M’boup on kora, djembe and talking drum. Inspired by the “ring shout” from the era of slavery, RAIN recreates the aura of what was once a secretive transporting religious ritual for enslaved Africans. Moran says: “I made a tape of my feet shuffling around in a circle on the banks of a lake in Switzerland. It was raining that morning, and appropriately, I was displaced. This tape plays and we accompany the sound of the footsteps. In concert, Ralph walks in a circle around the band for the entire length of the piece, representing the circular wave of singers and dancers.”

The one track not associated with a larger work is “Lift Every Voice” by James Weldon Johnson and his brother John. It was written in 1900, and Moran explains that “soon afterward the song was being sung at NAACP banquets to honor race heroes. It was soon dubbed the Negro National Anthem, and in the 50s or 60s was closely associated with the Civil Rights Movement. We recorded this in answer to RAIN, representing African-Americans from the 20th century as opposed to those of the 18th & 19th century.”

Artist in Residence is the sum of the parts of these three remarkable works, each offering multiple insights into Moran’s mind, passions, and strategies. But it is Milestone that provides the touchstone. “I now understand that much of jazz’s success is owed to its inherent abstractness,” says Moran. “I’ve recently created more music associated with people, places and events as opposed to pretty chords and nice grooves. Adrian Piper says that I’m in what artists call a ‘mannerist phase’ now. I like how that sounds.” He discerns these qualities in the work of Adrian Piper, “Adrian’s pieces tell stories, as seen by a black woman in the art world. They are poignant outpourings of her life. This was a goal we had for Milestone.”

Throughout, Artist In Residence showcases the continual creative potency of Moran’s flagship ensemble, The Bandwagon. “We never want our audience to think they’ve pegged us,” Moran says, “and yet we hope to be understood by all. I think audiences are looking for a few things during a performance: drama, challenging content and an ‘a-ha’ moment. We strive to provide those and many more.”