Some jazz musicians cloak their influences in shadow. The pianist Jason Moran takes the opposite tack: klieg lights, confetti, a marquee and a megaphone.
At the Jazz Standard on Wednesday night, he made a point of playing music by Thelonious Monk, Andrew Hill and Jaki Byard, the pianistic troika at the heart of his style. And he talked about his selections, with casual enthusiasm. “Check out some Monk,” he said at one point, making it sound not like a class assignment but some kind of stock tip.
It takes a reserve of confidence to reveal this much, and Mr. Moran has his share. Over the last decade he has developed an unmistakable voice and temperament, first as an instrumentalist and then as a bandleader, conceptualist and composer. His approach is inquisitive, his appetite expansive. Tellingly, the set also featured “I’ll Play the Blues for You” and “Nobody,” signature songs respectively for the blues hero Albert King and the minstrel pioneer Bert Williams. (Did he say, “Check out some Bert Williams?” He did.)
The Bandwagon, Mr. Moran’s fierce longstanding group, didn’t follow his lead so much as flank him on both sides. Though it’s a trio, with Tarus Mateen on bass and Nasheet Waits on drums, its sound described something bigger and more indivisible. On the opener, a variation on his original “Gangsterism” theme, Mr. Moran covered the range of the keyboard, scrabbling fast while his band mates roiled and ebbed around him. When they all punched into a downbeat together, it arrived like a thunderclap out of a storm.
After introducing Monk’s “Crepuscule With Nellie” as “one of the great love songs,” Mr. Moran played the theme with the solemnity of an étude. When the rhythm section joined in, the song tilted gently on its axis; its new arrangement involved some barely noticeable excisions that periodically shifted the meter into waltz time. An ascending triplet run in the bass clef, often treated as a passing ornamentation, took on structural significance.
Mr. Moran recently recreated Monk’s 1959 Town Hall concert at the San Francisco Jazz Festival, and this fall he will present his own interpretation of the music at Duke University. He put his research to use in a comic but pointed interlude, reading a passage from an unappreciative review in The New York Times of the original concert, over a looped mash-up of the music. Then he and the band played “Thelonious,” one of the songs he had just sampled, over the recorded cadence of a Rwandan drum corps.
Just as impressive were the songs by Mr. Hill and Mr. Byard, both mentors to Mr. Moran. Mr. Hill’s “Tough Love” got spiked with a driving 6/8 ostinato imported from elsewhere in his oeuvre, while Mr. Byard’s “To Bob Vatel of Paris” became a two-part invention: Mr. Moran played the theme as a solo stride number before the band entered and steered it toward joyful delirium.
The closer was “Milestone,” a minor-key art song composed by Mr. Moran’s wife, Alicia Hall Moran, a classical soprano. Set at first in a stately rubato, it gradually built up to a fury, then subsided again. It ended with a quiet upturn: a major chord, hopeful and serene.
No comments:
Post a Comment