A Conversation with Jason Moran

The celebrated pianist, composer, and Artistic Director for Jazz at the Kennedy Center talks with Ted Panken

Today I’m featuring an in-depth interview with jazz artist Jason Moran, conducted by Ted Panken.

You will learn more about Moran below, but Panken (who is making his debut at The Honest Broker) deserves an introduction in his own right. He is one of the most skilled interviewers in jazz journalism, with an impressive track record both as a broadcaster and in print. You may have seen his work in Downbeat, Jazz Times, or on some 500 albums where he has contributed liner notes. Panken has been honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Jazz Journalists Association, and is also a past winner of the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award. I’m delighted to showcase his work on The Honest Broker.

And now let’s turn our attention to the esteemed Jason Moran.

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A Conversation with Jason Moran

By Ted Panken

Of the many motivations that spur Jason Moran’s omnivorous approach to his musical calling, a big one is, as he puts it, “an opportunity to get into a person’s culture.” In a 2010 conversation, Moran cited Brahms as a container of German culture, Bartok for elaborating Hungarian rhythms. “The culture is embedded within the music,” he said. “Brad Mehldau, or Keith Jarrett, or McCoy Tyner might implement sounds from here or there, but it’s still uniquely American in the best sense of the word. Addressing culture in music allows you to look backward or look forward—you can do anything. It will all reflect your personal history, and then our collective history, which also includes whoever is in the audience. I’m continually trying to express the diverse things that influence me.”

The 48-year-old pianist’s latest investigation along these lines is From the Dancehall to the Battlefield, which he dropped in January via Bandcamp on Yes Records—his tenth release on the imprint he launched in 2016 after fulfilling his Blue Note contract with All Rise: A Joyful Elegy For Fats Waller. In conjunction with the yet-to-be-issued multi-media work In My Mind: Monk at Town Hall 1959, it comprises the third leg of a trilogy framed around the milieu of first-half-of-the-20th-century Harlem, where Moran moved in 1993 from Houston, Texas, to attend Manhattan School of Music and has resided ever since.

Jason Moran

The 15-piece suite is a centenary yahrzeit meditation on visionary African-American composer (and Harlemite) James Reese Europe (1881-1919), who died seven months after the armistice of the First World War, after surviving intense combat as First Lieutenant and bandleader with the all-Black 369^th Infantry Regiment, otherwise known as the Harlem Hellfighters—along the way, bringing jazz to the European continent. Prior to his service, Europe made his mark on early 20th-century Black musical theater with such luminaries as Ernest Hogan, George Walker, Will Vodery, Will Marion Cook, and Bert Williams. In 1910 he formed the Clef Club, a Black musicians’ organization from which Europe recruited multiple society orchestras that held a quasi-monopoly on what Eubie Blake (often designated by Europe to lead satellite units, as did Blake’s collaborator, Noble Sissle) called “private parties and entertainments” held by New York’s high society. From the Clef Club membership, Europe organized a 125-member orchestra to perform a kaleidoscopic 1912 Carnegie Hall concert of his sui generis works, some of which, by the aural evidence of Europe’s dozen or so contemporaneous recordings, directly foreshadow the first recordings labeled as jazz. He gained international prominence as musical director for the eminent white dancers Vernon and Irene Castle, with whom his Europe’s Society Orchestra toured.

James Reese Europe

Each of the aforementioned pieces hew to the interdisciplinary practice—in which references drawn from film, design, the highbrow visual arts, and pop culture augment a wide range of musical flavors—that Moran has followed since emerging as a bandleader at the cusp of the ’00s. This work is documented on nine albums with Blue Note Records, mostly with bassist Tarus Mateen and drummer Nasheet Waits of his Bandwagon Trio.

During those years, Moran—whose mentors included pianists Jaki Byard, Andrew Hill and Muhal Richard Abrams, all informed by the Harlem stride piano school and unfettered by notions of stylistic orthodoxy or genre—sidemanned with idiosyncratic elders like Von Freeman, Sam Rivers, Bunky Green, Charles Lloyd, Cassandra Wilson, and Paul Motian. He collaborated with conceptual artists Adrian Piper and Glenn Ligon, video pioneer Joan Jonas, photographers Lorna Simpson and Carrie Mae Weems, and painter Kara Walker; created installations for the Walker Museum in Minneapolis and the Whitney Museum in Manhattan; scored Ada DuVernay’s films Selma and The 13^th.

He succeeded Byard as a professor at Manhattan School of Music, then Fred Hersch at New England Conservatory. In 2014, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts appointed Moran Artistic Director for Jazz, bestowing institutional responsibilities that allow him “to direct the conversation around creative music in ways that don’t define what it is, but open the door to what it can be.”

In a 2017 conversation, Moran recalled the portal that led him to Thelonious Monk’s world. “When I was 14, I walked into my parents’ bedroom while they were watching footage of a friend who had died in a plane crash,” he said. “They were listening to Monk play ‘Round Midnight.’ That’s how it started—hearing the music my parents relied on to reflect what they felt in this time of loss. Monk instantly became my model of perfection, in a way that felt more cultural than aesthetic. When you’re learning Bach and Mozart and Brahms at age 7 to 9, you’d need an amazing teacher to help you find your personal relationship with their lives. But listening to Monk seemed like, ‘This is it.’ Then on the record jacket I saw this man who looks like people living in my neighborhood. When a person like Monk becomes your idea of perfection, everything else has to align or fall down the hill somewhat in relationship to him.

“A lot of my approach comes from techniques Monk developed. His attack—how he strikes a note really hard to make it jump out, or plays long, knotty runs from the top of the piano down to the bottom. He keeps the flourish always as part of his playing. And he keeps his Black aesthetic up-front and intact. He’s telling drummers ‘if I ain’t dancin’ it ain’t swinging.’ He’s still playing the hymns he loved when he was playing with the faith-healers. He keeps the embodiment of the Great Migration in his music. Those cultural landmarks are in the rhythms you hear all his drummers play, in how he comps, and then how he steps away and dances. He is not afraid to show where he comes from, whether it’s his tribute to Duke Ellington, where he TOTALLY transforms Ellington’s music in his trio, or how he plays homage to Fats Waller or James P. Johnson.”

By consistently applying the backward and the forward gaze in informed equipoise, Moran developed an unmistakably personal voice to refract his impressions of the world around him, as did New York paradigm shifters, all role models, like Europe, Ellington, Waller, Monk, and Johnson, whose “You’ve Got To Be Modernistic,” from 1930, Moran has covered and appropriated as a mantra. From the jump, his abiding aesthetic has held that “everything is ripe for deconstruction.” He continued: “I grew up in an environment where sampling was dominant. I’d hear grooves from James Brown, Mandrill, and Sly and the Family Stone, or samples from Art Blakey, Horace Silver, and Wayne Shorter, and then discover the source. Every piece of music is right to use as a creation of your own.”

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Can you talk about James Reese Europe’s achievement in creating an environment in which Black music could flourish?

Moran: I think he learned this very early. He had models in his parents, who knew the clues of progress and moved north in 1889. He inherits a mode of understanding that the music will represent more than just the song itself. Europe always was looking for community. He wasn’t just in the musician’s world. By the time Europe forms the Clef Club, and then the 369th Infantry band, he knows how to galvanize people. Contemporaneous reports about his Carnegie Hall concert with the Clef Club orchestra tell us that many of those musicians couldn’t read, that he was teaching the songs note by note. That’s not your normal bandleader. Then he tried to gather folks to go off to fight a war for a country that had yet to prove their allegiance to what Black America has to offer….It’s a lot to convince one of, even to this day, let alone 1917. I still wonder how he did this.

He incorporated extended techniques in his orchestrations. I think that’s one thing you’re referring to when you say that he taught the musicians note for note.

Moran: Yes. When you look at the military band charts that are available—like W.C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues,’ which says “Arranged by William Grant Still”—it sounds like one thing when we read it down, but when you hear the recording, they’re not simply playing what’s on the page. They fold in all this nuance—each trumpeter with incredible lip technique, or the pulls by the trombones, swaying those sounds all over the place. I often love listening to bands whose music I don’t play, wondering how they get this mixture to sound as it does. Then, if you sit in on a rehearsal, you see how the soup is made. I’d love to hear what a James Reese Europe rehearsal was like. How did he talk about articulation? How did he talk about dynamics? How did he talk about intention? How did he work with the Puerto Rican musicians who don’t speak English? How did he do that? Not the three sentences, but what’s that three hours like? I think in that fog is also his mastery. Fortunately, we have those few recordings—not enough—that document how he and his bands sounded.

I think there’s a code in those songs – and when the code is let out, it might shock you. The Bandwagon used to play Bert Williams’ “Nobody.” I wouldn’t say what song it was. I’d play the melody, and people loved it. I wondered what Bert Williams and his crew laid into this song. It’s the same with James Reese Europe—you try to find those codes that are let out into an audience because you’re signifying an era. I think certain chord progressions tell us about the level of oppression at particular stages of America’s history. For example, the II-V-Is of the 1940s contain a lot of dissonances that become something else in the 1960s. Europe’s songs also have some of this. But when stripped away, the melodies are heartbreakingly beautiful.

There’s a solo song on the record called “Clef Club.” I wonder how Europe orchestrated this for an ensemble, because there’s only piano sheet music for it. But the way this melody falls out, it’s almost like he’s in another world. It doesn’t sound like New York. It doesn’t sound like Western Europe. It’s like he’s centering these chords, this melody, this waltz upon some other place. I wanted to try to find that—and if I could find any little space to bring these things forward, it might relieve us to hear it in a way that doesn’t antiquate the music. I want the sound to have resonance today. I wrote a song, “For James,” that ends the album; it’s my ode to a seed of information he left in this problematic song called “Plantation Echoes,” a little phrase of transition material in this medley where I thought, “Oh, he’s got it figured out.”

How do you assess James Reese Europe’s relationship to contemporaneous cultural streams in Harlem—ragtime and stride, Black vaudeville, Black musical theater? He worked closely with Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake. Will Marion Cook—who gave Duke Ellington important information about composition—was conducting his orchestra.

Moran: Europe is right in the center of this. Directly after his death, Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle come to Broadway with Shuffle Along—that is the next turn. We don’t get to see the next ten years of Europe’s life, from age 39 to 49, within the Harlem Renaissance. But we do see where the thinking goes and how expansive it becomes.

Andrew Young told me you have to find a protégé. This was at the premiere of the film Selma that I scored; he attended with John Lewis—all his friends and revolutionaries. I feel James Reese Europe was able to find ways to continue his legacy within the crew of people he was around. In Songs by James Reese Europe, which has 70-80 pieces, you see how he was writing songs, who he was writing them for—from “A Royal Coon” in the early 1900s to “On Patrol in No Man's Land” when he was in the war. We also have to think about the way these stories were told on stage, on whose stage they were told, and for what money. That complicated things for that generation from 1900 to the 1920s.

I think these issues are still emblematic in pop music: After achieving stardom at a certain point, how do you move on? With James Reese Europe, you saw that progression. He challenged the situations he put his music into—having the Clef Club, writing for the Castles, and then taking it to war. I think Europe was tempting fate, in a way, and fate caught up to him—his untimely death. But I think his path starts to shape the constellation for people who love the music we write about and play. James Reese Europe precedes Fats Waller. So somehow, here I am, going further and further back into history, which was never my intention. But that’s the way the constellation got laid out.

How did going back into history become so important?

Moran: That’s how I was raised by my family in Houston, which is big and very close. When I left to go to New York City, I experienced a distance. My first step was deciding at 18 that I was going to study with Jaki Byard. For some reason, I didn’t want to study with anybody who was young, and Jaki, who was in his 70s, was the oldest cat I saw who was teaching somewhere. I stayed with Jaki for four years, because I was craving what he had in his hands. It seemed he was playing from the center of jazz history, but then you could see that line stretch very far away from it. Through those four years, it became normal for me to look at, let’s say, old scrolls and find the gems in them that can be replanted today. Jaki folded me into the lineage of those pianists who are able to find themselves in history rather than see it as distant. Jaki taught it. My parents and grandparents taught that, too. I want to say it’s a thing they made me carry when I left home.

Another Houston experience was the High School for Performing and Visual Arts, which produced musicians like Eric Harland, Robert Glasper, and Kendrick Scott. Our band director, Dr. Robert Morgan, always brought in musicians to share their knowledge with us: Milt Hinton, to Dizzy Gillespie, to Barry Harris, to Billy Harper, to Ellis Marsalis, to Billy Cobham, to Cedar Walton, to McCoy Tyner. On and on and on. I always say that my friends and I experienced a relationship to the primary source that we never wanted to lose. When enough of us moved to New York, we always sought a relationship with the primary source, the ones who had created the language. If you could get close—and even closer, perform on a stage with them—then you’d reached the mountaintop.

The school sent us out to play gigs with a quartet or quintet. We got paid. We became accustomed to dealing with all kinds of different situations, from a Christmas party to a wedding band, etc. We all got much better. Once I arrived in New York, I felt a dropoff in the level of musicianship I was encountering because the level was so high at HSPVA. Luckily, I had Jaki Byard to whip me every Monday.

Do you see parallels between Europe’s m.o. and that of another mentor, Muhal Richard Abrams, and others who came out of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM)?

Moran: A lot of AACM records found their way into my father’s record collection. Now, initially I may not understand why I’m attracted to someone, or some idea, and it takes a lot of time—or therapy—for me to figure out what made that step. With AACM people, I think it’s their relationship to making a canon of music, relying on each other to do it, and to never wait for the commercial side to say they should do something. When I graduated from Manhattan School of Music and started studying with Muhal, he was into: You have the power to generate yourself, and I’m going to give you some tools to help you generate when inspiration isn’t visiting you. I think about the way Muhal thought about Ellington or ragtime piano, or the way Henry Threadgill thinks about ragtime or thinks about James Reese Europe’s power, where the tuba feels at home.

One of Muhal’s seminal lessons was that music moves ahead through rhythm, not through harmony. That modification of where the syncopation lives is partially Black America’s musical gift to the world. I think James Reese Europe understood this. He was given this “king of syncopation” moniker, and I can’t help but try to understand what syncopation meant, and what it means to me today. I think it’s partially about how great the beat sounds—but it’s also what the beat means. I’ve kept wanting to try to amplify what this music means for that time. Not necessarily what it sounds like, but what does it mean? Or what do you think it means when you hear it? I also wanted to deal with the stories these musicians are trying to tell. They are at the cusp of using the abstract language that Louis Armstrong would bring to the fore ten years later, but they are not there yet.

Another AACM legacy you’ve practiced is an interdisciplinary approach—for example, Muhal Richard Abrams, Wadada Leo Smith and Roscoe Mitchell paint. Roscoe Mitchell and George Lewis do installations. Anthony Braxton does graphic scores. You’ve quite ingeniously created metaphors for your musical ideas through several installations; you’ve even recorded your musical responses as Julie Mehretu created a palimpsestic painting (MASS {Howl, eon}) in a decommissioned Harlem church. How did the notion of relating music to the visual arts gestate for you, and how does it factor into your current thinking?

Moran: It’s seminal. I remember going to Muhal’s house for a lesson, seeing his easel in the corner, and knowing that he had a painting process that helped his composition process, or a composition process that helped his painting process. The big moment happened in 2005, when I began these public relationships with visual arts—working with Joan Jonas or Adrian Piper, and documenting them on the Blue Note record, Artists In Residence. I also heard conversation in the art world about what jazz represented. I remember seeing Andrew Hill play two concerts at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Knowing that relationship was soulful to me, feeling that I didn’t necessarily have to look only to the Village Vanguard as a place to distribute the music, but there could be other spaces to unveil histories that maybe the Vanguard isn’t able to house.

Henry Threadgill often worked with a great artist, David Hammons; Andrew Hill worked with Emilio Cruz—all these artists living together in a community. That’s the community I wanted. I dreamed the myth that the Harlem Renaissance was this world where the artists, the painters, the poets, the choreographers, the sculptors, the architects, the chefs—everybody knew each other. It’s why I stayed in Harlem. I want to know where people are pushing the edge of the form. And I continue trying to have relationships like that because I think it will help inform the way I need to be in making music.

Another outgrowth of the AACM is that different members embedded themselves as centers of influence in institutions of higher learning—Anthony Braxton at Wesleyan, George Lewis at Columbia, Roscoe Mitchell at Mills College and so forth. You’re Artistic Director for Jazz at the Kennedy Center and a professor at New England Conservatory. Perhaps Europe’s plan to keep deploying multiple Black bands performing for the wealthy would establish a level of trust and familiarity that might eventually induce them to sponsor his dream of establishing a permanent National Negro Orchestra represents an analogous notion.

Moran: I asked Henry Threadgill one day if he wanted to come give a class at NEC. He said, “Well, Jason, not really, because somebody has to stay out in the street.” In that comment, I feel there was an understanding that not everybody can go to the same place. We need outposts all around. But the musicians I’ve encountered in institutions found a way to give into it or subvert it. If a student is able to find a safe harbor in your studio class or in your ensemble to learn about the music’s history from your perspective, and also to be broadened by the challenges of playing this music in general, then that will be a great place for them to learn. They’ll never forget their interactions with you as they proceed through the rest of their careers. Jaki, Andrew, and Muhal were very different teachers, but each had a mode that said, “I’m here to share.” Once, when I hadn’t called Andrew Hill for a lesson in a long time, he called me and said, “You know, Jason, I’m not out here just giving this stuff away to everybody.” I was over to his house the next day. He was like, “look, I’m trying to help you out; let me help you.” He was right.

I haven’t found a reason to stop, except that I get tired. You can say it’s difficult, because each year you’re carving out so much time to dedicate to the educational component. But, as I’m sure every great teacher also talks about, you end up learning a ton more from the student than you could ever share with them. There is something to understanding history by listening to how a young musician perceives it. How they hear you. The music they bring in. What they’re listening to right now. What music they feel is seminal to the canon. It’s definitely not the same music you think. And what is their popular music? I came to New York in the ’90s, the golden era of hip hop for people who were my age. No one who’s 19 right now cares about that.

How do young musicians respond to James Reese Europe and the traditions that you interrogate?

Moran:  I did a residency workshop dedicated to James Reese Europe, and I had some of the singers sing some songs. A guy going to war, singing a song to his girlfriend; or, when he comes home from the war, calling on the phone saying, “okay, we’re ready to meet up—I’m back, I made it, victory is ours.” I asked them to think not only about what those songs are, because they might sound corny, but it’s their job to put them in the space that they as musicians want to view it from. That’s what Jaki Byard was trying to teach me early on: You can look at these songs and play Scott Joplin the way it is, but you’ll learn much more if you figure out what it means to you today. Jaki was able to shuffle through history and always breathe life into it.

I try to show that to students. I go from a moment where a student plays something as is, and it sounds terrible, and then I tell them why it’s important to see if they can find another sound that wasn’t on the page that plays the same note in a way that makes the whole band come to life. They have to experiment. Through that process, the musicians learn more about the songs they’re playing. Rather than, “Did I play it right?” it’s “How did we do it together?” By the end, when we played our concert, it was clear, because we saw the audience transported listening to these stories about a musician who they had no history with or didn’t know about.

Another prominent throughline for Europe was to create an environment that offered maximal control of his means of production as much as possible. That’s another AACM aspiration for sure, and many musicians have taken this direction over the years, as you’ve done with Yes Records.

Moran: I especially thought From the Dancehall to the Battlefield had to be on its own because of what James Reese Europe represents. They even bought their own building for the Clef Club. They were about it. I had an incredible 18 years at Blue Note. Bruce Lundvall gave me great freedom as a recording artist. But I started to have a backlog of things that I wanted to record more quickly than the label’s schedule allowed for, and I realized it isn’t that expensive to make a record and put them out myself. I also thought I would learn a lot more through paying for a recording session. I started focusing on trying to have a performing career that supports my own recording career.

It’s important for an artist to own their own canon. I hope that’s the smart thing. I won’t know right now. But I want to limit the places where it’s distributed. I do not trust the streaming services of Apple or Spotify. I don’t think that model mimics anything but a plantation. I hope the audience understands that this costs something to make. I feel great right now, having had support from the musicians to make the record, and for all the other gigs that I galvanized to pay for it. There’s no magic patron. There’s a group of gigs, and you save for the goal. That’s how it gets done. That’s what I think we’re supposed to do.