Moran recorded first with
Greg Osby and debuted as a band leader with the 1999 album Soundtrack to Human Motion. Since then, Moran has released albums with his trio The Bandwagon, solo, as a sideman, and with other bands. He combines
post-bop and
avant-garde jazz, blues, classical music,[2][3]stride piano,[1][4] and
hip hop.
Career
Early years
Moran was born in
Houston, Texas, and grew up in the
Pleasantville neighborhood of Houston. His parents, Andy, an
investment banker, and Mary,[5] a teacher, encouraged his musical and artistic sensibilities at the
Houston Symphony, museums and galleries, and through a relationship with
John T. Biggers and a collection of their own.[1][6] Moran began training at
classical piano playing, in Yelena Kurinets'
Suzuki method music school,[5] when he was six. However, his father's extensive record collection (around 10,000 in 2004), varied from
Motown to classical to avant-garde jazz.[5]
As a boy he developed a preference for
hip hop music[7][8] over the piano until, at the age of 13, he first heard the song "
′Round Midnight" by
Thelonious Monk at home,[9] and switched his efforts to jazz. Monk's childlike melodies, with their many silent spaces, struck him as relatively easy to play and not overly ornate, while the rhythms were reminiscent of hip hop songs, and the harmonies unorthodox.[10] Both jazz and hip hop were part of Houston's
skateboarding scene in which he was involved.[11][12]
He attended Houston's
High School for the Performing and Visual Arts (HSPVA), graduating in 1993[13] from the jazz program headed by Robert Morgan. In his senior year, he was student director of the school's jazz combo[5] and part of the Texas high school all-state jazz ensemble.[14][15]
Late 1990s
He then enrolled at the
Manhattan School of Music, from which he would graduate in 1997 with a BM degree, to study with pianist
Jaki Byard.[1][6] The next year he participated in
Betty Carter's Jazz Ahead exclusive workshop, composing the piece "Make a Decision"[16] for the final concert.
In 1997, when Moran was a senior at Manhattan School of Music, he was invited to join the band of
saxophonistGreg Osby for a European tour, following a conversation that lingered mostly on older piano jazz, and no audition.[1] Osby liked his playing, and Moran continued to play with Osby's group upon their return to the United States, making his first recorded appearance on Osby's 1997
Blue Note album Further Ado. He would subsequently appear on several other Osby albums, and Osby would introduce him to avant-garde pianists
Muhal Richard Abrams and
Andrew Hill.[17]
His stint with Osby led Moran to sign a contract of his own with Blue Note. His debut Soundtrack to Human Motion was released in 1998. Moran was joined on the album by Osby,
drummerEric Harland (a classmate of Moran's at the Manhattan School, and the one who recommended him to Osby),
vibraphonistStefon Harris and acoustic
bassistLonnie Plaxico.
2000s
Moran's next album, 2000's Facing Left (after a work by
Egon Schiele[18]), featured a trio that formed out of Osby's group, New Directions:[1] Moran, bassist
Tarus Mateen and drummer
Nasheet Waits. Compositions were some of Moran's and some by Mateen,
Duke Ellington,
Björk and Byard. The trio, which came to be known as The Bandwagon, was joined by saxophonist and pianist
Sam Rivers for their next album, Black Stars, which appeared in 2001.[19]Black Stars was included in NPR's "The 50 Most Important Recordings of the Decade."[20]
In 2002, Moran released a solo album, Modernistic, and followed it in 2003 with a live trio album, recorded at
New York's
Village Vanguard, called The Bandwagon.[21]
Moran's 2005 album Same Mother, an exploration of the blues, brought guitarist
Marvin Sewell into the Bandwagon mix.
Moran's 2006 release, Artist in Residence, included a number of selections from different works commissioned by museums, all of which premiered in 2005: "Milestone" is centered on a visual work by
Adrian Piper from the
Walker Art Center;[7] "The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things" was incorporated into a preexisting installation of that name by artist
Joan Jonas;[28] and "RAIN", inspired by
ring shouts from
African American slaves,[19] is a recording of The Bandwagon with guests
Marvin Sewell,
Ralph Alessi and Abdou Mboup. Critical reception to Artist in Residence has been arguably colder that to his other releases.[29]
Moran's IN MY MIND, premiered in 2007,[30] is a multimedia presentation inspired by
Thelonious Monk's 1959 "large band" concert at
The Town Hall in New York City. It utilises filmed and taped material of Monk's rehearsal, found in the archive of
W. Eugene Smith, and video art by David Dempewolf.[31] A text-laden painting from
Glenn Ligon extracted the words "In My Mind" - which Monk says on one of Smith's tapes – as did Moran, incorporating the soundbite into the set. The program is played by The Big Bandwagon:[32] the trio with a largely changeable five piece
horn section. The New York Times wrote: "It had a magical balance of theory and intuition, and the crowd stayed fully with it."[33] The February 2009 installation is the subject of a documentary film of the same name.[34]
In April 2007 Moran took the piano in
Charles Lloyd's New Quartet, succeeding
Geri Allen.[35][36] He was the last member to join the group,[37] which keeps touring (as of 2014), having recorded one studio album and two live ones. Moran and Lloyd recorded a duo album, Hagar's Song, in 2013.
From September 2009 to about 2012 Moran toured with
Dave Holland's Overtone Quartet.[38][39]
"Live: Time" is a 2008 complement to the
Philadelphia Museum of Art exhibition on
The Quilts of Gee's Bend.[40][41]Cane was written for classical wind quintet
Imani Winds - among them Moran's college classmate Toyin Spellman.[3] It premiered in October 2008, and appeared[42] in their album Terra Incognita in 2010; it relates to
Marie Thérèse Metoyer and Moran's family history in
Natchitoches, Louisiana.[43][44] "Refraction" is a ballet Moran scored and accompanied for
Alonzo King LINES Ballet in 2009.[45] Four independent short films and a feature documentary appeared in the 2000s with soundtracks by Moran (see below). In addition, he collaborated with Ligon on 2008's The Death of Tom:[46] an abstract, conceptual, video artwork. Reflecting their shared historical interests, Moran contributed a score based on the song "
Nobody" by
Bert Williams.[47] The work is in the
MoMA collection,[48] but he played to it again in a screening in 2011.[49]
2010s
The album Ten,[50][51][52] released in 2010, marked a ten-year interval from the Bandwagon's debut, Facing Left. It features "Blue Blocks" off the Philadelphia Museum commission, "RFK in the Land of Apartheid", from an original score to a documentary film of the same name,[53] and "Feedback Pt. 2", an homage to
Jimi Hendrix's performance at the 1967
Monterey Pop Festival.[54] Monk's "Crepuscule with Nellie" was recorded at the IN MY MIND tour.[55]Ten also contains a composition by Moran and Andrew Hill, and others by
Leonard Bernstein, Jaki Byard,
Conlon Nancarrow and
Bert Williams.[56] The Downbeat 2010 critics' poll voted Ten "Jazz Album of the Year", while also voting Moran "Pianist of the Year" and "Jazz Artist of the Year".[57]The New York Times chose Ten among 2010 top 10 pop and jazz albums.[58]
Moran's composition, "Slang", was commissioned for the 2011
Other Minds Festival in San Francisco.[60] In the May 2012
Whitney Biennial, Alicia Hall Moran and Jason curated BLEED, a week-long event that involved many artists and artisans, and aimed to expose artistic processes to the point "it has to be scary".[1][61] Later that year a new performance with Joan Jonas, Reanimation was first staged in
dOCUMENTA (13).[62][63][64] In the summer of 2013 and the next, Moran accompanied, with The Bandwagon and guest
Jeff Parker,
skateboarding shows in
SFJAZZ Center.[11][65]
In April 2014 Moran and Imani Winds premiered Jump Cut Rose, which he wrote for the quintet and a piano,[3][66] In May, Looks of A Lot, a theatrical co-production with
Theaster Gates on the theme of Chicago artistic history[47] premiered in the city's
Symphony Center; participants included The Bandwagon, the
Kenwood Academy Jazz Band,[67]Ken Vandermark and
Katie Ernst, bassist and vocalist.[68] The same month, the Bandwagon played their composition, "The Subtle One", to a ballet adaptation by
Ronald K. Brown.[69][70] In September he appeared twice in the
Monterey Jazz Festival: Leading a Fats Waller Dance Party, in a one-piano duo with Robert Glasper,[71] and with Charles Lloyd New Quartet.[72] He was responsible for the music of the multi-nominated 2016 documentary
13th.
Moran has been on the faculty of the
New England Conservatory of Music since 2010, where he coaches two ensembles, teaches lessons, and gives masterclasses. At the
Kennedy Center he has been the musical adviser for jazz since 2011, and artistic director for jazz since 2014, occupying the position of
Billy Taylor.[85]
Apart from these positions, Moran has organized events such as "713-->212: Houstonians in NYC" in January 2011[86][87][88] and Very Very Threadgill, a two-day festival dedicated to
Henry Threadgill,[89] his "favorite composer",[90] in September 2014.
Moran and his family manage the granting of "Moran Scholarship Award", first set in 1994 for jazz students at HSPVA. In 2005 they set in Houston The Mary Lou Chester Moran Foundation, for similar purposes.[91][92]
In 2015 Moran was appointed Honorary Professor at the
Rhythmic Music Conservatory (RMC) in Copenhagen, Denmark, where he periodically conducts workshops and master classes.[94]
Awards and honors
Closing 2010, Francis Davis wrote in Village Voice, "Moran's only competition in the Fifth Annual Village Voice Jazz Critics' Poll was Jason Moran. Ten, his first trio album in seven years, won Album of the Year in a landslide, but that's not all. The pianist figured prominently on the runner-up, Rudresh Mahanthappa and Bunky Green's Apex, and Charles Lloyd's Mirror, which finished fourth...Add Paul Motian's Lost in a Dream...that gives the 2010 MacArthur Fellow four appearances in the Top 10"[95]
JazzTimes' 2011 Expanded Critics' Poll voted Moran second place "Artist of the Year" and first place "Pianist of the Year"; the Charles Lloyd New Quartet, "Acoustic Group of the Year" and The Bandwagon fifth place in that category.[96] In 2013, the New Quartet was second place in its category and Moran second in pianists.[97]
Moran won the
Jazz Journalists Association's Up-n-Coming Jazz Musician award in 2003. The Down Beat critics' poll voted him Rising Star Jazz Artist, Rising Star Pianist, and Rising Star Composer for three years (2003–05). In 2005, he was named Playboy magazine's first Jazz Artist of the Year. In 2007, he was named a USA Prudential Fellow by
United States Artists.[98] In 2010, he was named a
MacArthur Fellow.[99][100]
Another full-length documentary, Grammar about "jazz through Jason Moran" and genre boundaries, is in the making, after first director Radiclani Clytus had found funding in a 2012
kickstarter campaign.[102]
In 2018, Moran received his first museum survey at the Walker Art Center[103] and was written up as an artist-to-watch by Cultured Magazine.[104]
In 2018, Moran wrote the score for 'Between the World and Me' by Ta-Nehisi Coates which premiered at the Apollo Theater.
[105]
Family
Moran married Alicia Hall, a mezzo-soprano and artistic collaborator,[1] in 2003.[61] They have worked on several projects together. They live in
Harlem[106] and have twins. He has an older and a younger brother.[5][41] Two of his cousins, Tony and Michael Llorens, toured with
Albert King playing piano and drums,[107] and were recorded on In Session.[108]
^A webcast of Moran and Glasper, playing with a double trio (
"Houstonians in NYC: audio streams". Joshua Jackson.), was mentioned in a New York Times' albums of the year list by Ben Ratliff:
ref.