10-25-19 | Songs for Listening | Jason Moran
Jazz pianist, composer, curator, and performance artist Jason Moran picked tunes for Friday, October 25 at Songs for Listening.
Jason was born in Houston, TX in 1975 and earned a degree from the Manhattan School of Music, where he studied with Jaki Byard. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2010 and is the Artistic Director for Jazz at The Kennedy Center. Moran currently teaches at the New England Conservatory.
Jason is deeply invested in reassessing and complicating the relationship between music and language, and his extensive efforts in composition, improvisation and performance are all geared towards challenging the status quo while respecting the accomplishments of his predecessors. His activity stretches beyond the many recordings and performances with masters of the form including Charles Lloyd, Bill Frisell, and the late Sam Rivers, and his work with his trio The Bandwagon (with drummer Nasheet Waits and bassist Tarus Mateen) has resulted in a profound discography for Blue Note Records. The scope of Jason’s partnerships and music-making with venerated and iconic visual artists is extensive. He has collaborated with such major figures as Adrian Piper, Joan Jonas, Glenn Ligon, Stan Douglas, Adam Pendleton, Lorna Simpson, and Kara Walker; commissioning institutions of Moran’s work include the Walker Art Center, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Dia Art Foundation, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Harlem Stage, and Jazz at Lincoln Center.
Moran has a long-standing collaborative practice with his wife, the singer Alicia Hall Moran; as named artists in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, they together constructed BLEED, a five-day series of live music. BLEED explored the power of performance to cross barriers and challenge assumptions, and it was widely hailed as groundbreaking in the music and performance realm. Together they also made Two Wings: The Music of Black America in Migration, an evening-length concert that premiered at Carnegie Hall & went on to play DC, Hamburg, and Chicago.
In 2018, Moran had his first solo museum exhibition which showed at the Walker Art Center, Institute of Contemporary Art and Wexner Center for the Arts, and is currently up at the Whitney.
[above bio is taken, largely, from the site of Jason’s gallerist Luhring Augustine.]
'Infatuation Eyes' by Herbie Nichols from 'Love, Gloom, Cash, Love'
'House Party Starting by Herbie Nichols from Herbie Nichols Trio
'And More Dirt' by Henry Threadgill from 'Dirt ... And More Dirt'
'When I am Laid in Earth' from 'Dido & Aeneas' written by Henry Purcell, performed by Leontyne Price.
