Moran in Monkian Terms

“For me, it starts and ends with Thelonious Monk,” pianist Jason Moran stated matter-of-factly in response to one of those mundane influence queries. “I mean the list of pianists is long for sure, but Monk is it—the way he focused on a relatively small amount of material for many years, the way he developed a particular aesthetic, the freedom when he danced on stage …”

The exchange took me so far aback as to be disturbing. I’ve heard everything from Herbie Nichols to Bill Evans in the 31-year-old Moran’s playing and trio deployment, not to mention the merging of even more disparate forces like James P. Johnson and Cecil Taylor, coloring each moment on Moran’s seven Blue Note records with a different and boldly effective hew. Furthermore, he’s made all that influence apparent without resorting to heavy-handed reference. His work is never encyclopedic for its own sake; it exudes pride in the broadest interpretations of music as witnessed by the early 21st century.

But Monk? That genius of the singular vision, the master of a steadily slow-burning career following hard on the heels of a big compositional bang? The connection was unclear until a bit of meditation on the man and his music afforded some insight. Rooted in swing like Joyce was rooted in Dublin and never really feeling the need to abandon formative rhetoric, no matter how far afield travel and travail took him, Monk created a language whose repercussions are still being felt sixty years after its emergence. When Monk was thirty, he began to cut what are now seen as his first definitive sides for the fledgling Blue Note label. There, the impetus that rendered “Blue Skies” into the rollicking “In Walked Bud” also gave rise to the similarly transformed and intimidating “Evidence”, serving up “justice” to player and classroom teacher alike. It’s Webernesquely syncopated head bespeaks absorption of multiple traditions over a simple dose of “Ding-Ding da-Ding” simplicity that continues to turn heads around and put feet in motion.

I’m not necessarily suggesting that Moran sounds like Monk, nor do I mean to imply that his music will have a similar impact on history and development. While his success in the commercial arena cannot be denied, my feeling is that the full scope of his talent remains to be seen. His allegiance to Monk is evident, though, in very broad strokes, in terms of planning and execution rather than pianistic approach. True, compositions like “Another One” exhibit definite Monkish traits—the short sharp bursts of clusterally percussive whimsy that informed Monk’s pianism are certainly evident. However, the intervening years have brought Monk, bebop and subsequent linguistic approaches into the standard vocabulary of any “jazz” player, a term about which Moran shows no qualms. “Fine with me! Brilliant people use the word; equally brilliant people hate it—there are convincing arguments on both sides.” Moran’s very conscious of all manner of reference, both overt and covert. “I always hear my references back to other pianists—that’s where I am now. Once you mix them all up, it becomes a different being.”

While such thinking is symptomatic of a post-modernism, which, I’m fairly certain, would be quite foreign to Monk’s worldview, the elder pianist’s work is at least a conduit for a nascent form of such multifarious expression. Moran has made it work for him with surprising regularity. His discs might be viewed as composites, as the slices of life to which the liners to his 1999 debut, Soundtrack to Human Motion, make endearing allusion. The album would be a blueprint in several ways, not least of which was the inauguration of the “Gangsterism” series. In part a direct tribute to Andrew Hill, it would be transformed over the succeeding six years while always maintaining some motivic semblance of the original; changes in tempo, of register and orchestration, never allowing the initial vision to be extinguished. The album also brings to the fore a whimsically profound allegiance to several simultaneously invoked periods of “jazz” history, and while none is canonized, neither is anything excluded.

It’s this, the very idea of a constant but varied core concept, that has molded and unified Moran’s multifarious projects, and their uniform success is to his credit as conceptualist. His most recent disc, Artist in Residence is a series of commissions. Superficially, there’s nothing more to the “concept” than that; seemingly in support of a diverse view, the oft-analyzed opening track samples and repeats the phrase “Break Down”, giving rise to a list of barriers in need of removal. Really though, this is just another foreshadowing, as “Artists Ought to be Writing” makes plain. Adrian Piper’s remonstration with artists to expose the presuppositions behind what they do is telling. I interpret her words to mean that simple breakdown is not the point, and that “the work” still stands as an entity worth repeated and multi-angled exploration.

In Moran’s case, the constructs are somewhat Rabelaisian or Faulknerian, involving constant “spilling over” and cross-reference: “Artists” continues the thread established by “Break Down” but also invokes shades of his own “Ringing My Phone (Straight Outa Istanbul)”, where human speech is also set to an acrobatic piano accompaniment. The fact that the Bandwagon, Moran’s long-standing trio including bassist Tarus Mateen and drummer Nasheet Waits, has come to understand the multiplicity of Moran’s present idiom demonstrates the consummate craftsmanship of all concerned.

I broached the question of a “unified” style to Moran. After all, there’s no mistaking Monk, and while Moran’s pianism is prodigious, he’s still a young artist. For him, that’s the point. “I need to investigate each one of these roads I’ve been traveling,” he says of the recordings he’s made, “I really need to explore each one fully. Only time will tell, I’m in no position to predict any stylistic outcomes now.” A possible upcoming project is what he calls a “Reconsideration” of Monk’s 1959 Town Hall concert, what I’m gathering to be a kind of microhistorical revisitation. If realized, it should be a fitting homage to a revered conceptualist, a project that renders Moran and Monk transgenerational brothers in theory, or at least in the conceptual realm.

~ Marc Medwin