Jason Moran - The Bandwagon

Blue Note 80917

Is this fly guy, this polymath, this hipster didactic, being hyped by his “independent” record company, that Blue Note once sub-titled (mottoed?) “the finest in jazz since 1939”, now branded in the popular consciousness as a Grammy machine? Something tells me he is riding a sizable cushion of advertising dollars and street team promotion. And there’s a more invidious, more subtly-plotted form of hype being promulgated here. At one very cynical level, Jason Moran – more so than either the more seasoned Joe Lovano and Cassandra Wilson or occasional collaborator Stefon Harris – is the Bruce Lundvall-helmed Blue Note’s real claim to relevance to those listeners who have remained loyal to the mystique of that venerable firm’s catalog. And never, ever forget that the apparent absence of hype is the biggest hype of all… Jason Moran offers marketers the kind of pitch that comes along only once or twice in a business cycle: he has integrity and class, and he also has “crossover appeal”. For such a young musician, charges of artistic compromise bounce right off his gleaming profile.

Yet something else tells me that neither Moran nor any other jazz artist as apparently serious about his / her craft as this young pianist / composer / bandleader will ever really benefit from hype. Like any vehicle that relies on hot air for its buoyancy, hype can be difficult to steer. Just ask some of those musicians who have had their major label-issued wheels re-possessed: Greg Tardy; Rodney Kendrick; Winard Harper; Ron Miles; even Branford Marsalis. So let the purple orchids waft down to the ballroom floor, welcome the “first great jazz artist of the 21st century”, have the man’s personal assistant schedule his Blindfold Test and his festival appearances, get the major “newsweekly” magazines to pull their stories about the tales of jazz’s death being greatly exaggerated out of cold storage… This is not to say that Jason Moran does not deserve whatever attention he is accorded. We should just bear in mind that not every kind of attention is created equally. Jason Moran is also an African-American, a “fact” which, no matter how difficult it may make live for certain individuals carries a somewhat different set of advantages and disadvantages when one is in the business of cultural representation. The engine of hype may not be the most efficient, but it is unusual in that it can run on just about any variety of fuel. So, when I say Jason Moran is an “African-American”, I say so with the full awareness – isn’t it common sense? – that this description is not equal to one identity and one identity only. To acknowledge that Moran is African-American is not necessarily simply to point to the color of his skin, or talk about his lineage, or even to speculate upon a reserve of private experience to which O do not in any case have access. Rather, to state the obvious here is to remove it from utter and absurd self-evidence; the reference to “being” African-American, and it strikes me that it is an experience you can gain or lose, buy or sell, honor or disgrace… is really a reference to Moran’s position in a community in which jazz as a primarily African-American cultural product retains its unique mix of values. Moran may not be a visionary, he may be too urbane for that, but he is one of the few musicians unquestionably working in an idiom that is recognizably “jazz” and who is keeping that idiom vital largely by means of a highly sensitive (re)survey of the territories that are already within its city limits: “swing feel”; American popular song; riffing; harmonic investigation; motivic improvisation; the tonal elasticity of melody and melodic development; and an acute sense of personal style.

The basic musical “facts” that are a matter of public record are these: Moran has an appreciation, and, yes, even a real, demonstrated knowledge of jazz piano tradition from James P. Johnson to Cecil Taylor. He has collaborated – not just played behind or worked with – living masters like Sam Rivers and Andrew Hill, and he’s done his apprentice work with sharp cats of a slightly earlier generation like Greg Osby. He knows his repertoire, writes original tunes of unusual grace and intricacy – his ballads are particularly noteworthy, as tender as Bill Evans in their harmonies, but without the occasional mush – and he has the rare ability to re-work “pop” material in a very creative, non-gimmicky way. At the same time, Moran is not too eclectic for his own good, and his consistent, evolving vision of what he wants to accomplish is not afflicted by over-cleverness. It makes sense that on this live album Moran would pay homage to Jaki Byard, a keyboard artist of similar temperament and abilities.

As it was for Humble Pie and Bob Seger and many other hard rock acts in the 1970’s, the obligatory live album is not only cheap to produce (ever wonder why so many independent improve releases document gigs?), thus easier to turn towards profitability; it looks as good on a list of career accomplishments, especially if one hasn’t had enough measurable chart success to justify a “greatest hits” album. Live recordings such as The Bandwagon function a little differently, though they too are tokens of a musician’s “arrival”. The Bandwagon was recorded at the oldest nightclub in the known universe. At least the history of the place makes it feel that old. The Village Vanguard’ solidity is not just a matter of it’s thick, deep-anchored basement walls. A vault of sound accretes night after night, sounds turned to a kind of plaster, trapped in smoke and chatter and the vapors of ice melting in millions of drink minimums. When I think of the Vanguard, I think of Monk dancing through the kitchen, or Art Pepper photographed between sets, a roll of toilet paper visible in an open cabinet above his drawn and frightened face. But The Bandwagon, recorded at a very low dynamic level, as if to mute these associations, is not as live as the time and place the music originally occupied. It is not strictly documentary. True to Moran’s principles, he skews it with an introductory track of looped vocals and audience noise that could only have been spliced together in the studio. Yet this snippet fades as we’re dropped right into “Another One”, on which Moran’s trio unwinds a Guadi staircase of a theme like someone peeling an orange while managing to keep the rind all in one piece. There’s also a gorgeous fantasy (largely right-angled, not wispy or baroque) of a Brahms “Intermezzo” here; it’s a brave gesture, considering how square Brahms has become, even to the symphony season subscriber audience. “Planet Rock”, the record’s climax, and, it could be argued, its bid for notoriety – one can easily foresee a sticker on the CD shrinkwrap proclaiming “Features a remake of Afrika Bambatta’s hip-hop classic” with faceless enthusiasm; Moran already offered a one-man band version on his previous Blue Note release, Modernistic – treats algorithmic permutations as funk. Far from being a crowd-pleaser, the performance leaves at least this listener something to ponder, such as the relationship between cyberpunk and M-BASE.

The Bandwagon sounds to me like an particularly ambitious etude on album-making: programming, editing, over-dubbing. Like any etude, then, there s as much musical merit here as there is sheer calisthenic vigor. The most intriguing pieces here are three from a longer series in which Moran models his keyboard articulation and melodic development on speech patterns: Turkish, Chinese, African-American vernacular, to be precise. I’m no pianist, but I can’t imagine what Moran pulls of here lies easily under fingers but those belonging to the most technically adept players. We often talk about vocalized horn work, but not piano work. Of course, foreign, or non-native, languages, tend to sound as if they are exhaled with much greater rapidity than one’s native language. The listener is aware primarily of syllables, and individual words can escape notice. Barriers have been broken, and all sounds seem connected in ways that, given expression, might amuse or even shock native speakers. And what of the interlocutors here? There’s Moran, and Tarus Mateen (bass, Fender bass), and Nasheet Waits (drums); there’s also you and I, listening to The Bandwagon in the car, at the listening station, at home, wherever… and there’s the Village Vanguard audience itself, present in applause and the occasional shout that intervenes between the music and the ambient digital hiss that signals their attentiveness. Was the audience privy to the vocal tracks to be heard on “Infospace”, “Gentle Shifts South”, and “Ringing My Phone (Straight Outta Istanbul)” (which makes me appreciate Bud Powell-bursting keyboard fireworks in an utterly new way)? Those portions of the performance could easily have been laid over the music after the fact. Are these voices glosses, footnotes, a kind of found poetry? Delaminated, “Gentle Shifts South” reveals itself to be an aural genealogy: the intermittently intelligible voices are those of Moran’s own family. Do these voices, clearly from another generation, telling tales of another America, obscure or enhance the lovely, stately theme? The imposition of this material inspiration and source material makes the record resemble an exhibit that presents to us not just the final sculptures but also all the sketches and maquettes that factored into their production.

Not all artists have methods and preoccupations in the sense that each of their creations is a precision-tooled part of a recognizable whole. But everything I’ve heard by Moran, including this album, leads me to believe that Moran is just such an artist. The more I review his work so far, from his debut Soundtrack To Human Motion, with its references to kinesics, to the Constructivist boogaloo of New Directions, to the playful rpm, click-and-pop tricks his solo piano recital Modernistic (the album with the upswept eyebrow, the quizzical made permanent and thus rakish), the more it seems to me that Moran’s music is a long, James-ian interrogation of the premises underlying systems of communication. What does is mean to speak up, to act out? When does expression become communication? Why do we open ourselves to exaggeration and prevarication? Just how are we all “divided by a common language”? It makes sense. Maybe I mistake effect for cause. Maybe the hype is really but one repercussion of an intricately balanced passivity on Moran’s part: a give to the record company that is also a take. Some of us pitiable listeners spent our youthful hours poring over those old Reid Miles Blue Note album covers. Albums as diverse as Dexter Gordon’s A Swingin’ Affair, Lee Morgan’s City Lights, and Grachan Moncur III’s Some Other Stuff really do sound the way they look, leading one to search for connections between, say, typographical decisions and the finer points of the enclosed album’s arrangements. But, as it turns out, Reid Miles was a classical music buff who almost never heard the sessions before he (re-)designed them. As a commodity, a recording is a very curious kind of communication. The recording requires interpretation, and, in fact, the thing that we buy thinking of as complete is not a total package until we decide to construe it. Moran may be looking back at the consumer from the cover of The Bandwagon – has the same graphic artist worked on all his albums? – but perhaps he’s pointing with this gaze at all the room that sits between the hammers and strings of the piano that doubles for the eponymous vehicle’s back seat. As if to say: "Get prepared. Hop on."