Visual artist, composer, bandleader, and magazine editor Jason Moran’s collaborative practice often blurs boundaries between jazz performance, visual art, and museums. Professionally trained as a musician, Moran melds genres of jazz, hip-hop, blues, funk, and spoken word.
Early Life
A native of Houston, Texas, Moran was born in 1975. As a young child, Moran attended the Suzuki Music School of Houston and was exposed to an eclectic array of music and art via his father’s extensive record collection, visits to the symphony, and trips to art museums. As a child, Moran would play in sight of the John T. Biggers paintings that hung in his parents’ home. Moran developed his skills as a jazz musician while attending and graduating from the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Houston. After graduating, Moran moved to New York where he studied at the Manhattan School of Music beginning in 1997. In 1999, Blue Note Records released Moran’s debut album, Soundtrack to Human Motion, which Moran had recorded the year before. The ten-track album was well received by critics. Between 2000 and 2005, Moran released the albums Facing Left, Black Stars, Modernistic, The Bandwagon, and Same Mother on the Blue Note Records label.
Artist in Residence
As Moran continued to record and release albums he was also able to develop collaborative projects with visual and performing artists. In 2005 Moran released Artist in Residence, which features compositions commissioned by the Walker Art Center, the Dia Art Foundation, and the Lincoln Center. Moran was inspired by artwork in the Walker’s collection, specifically the work of Adrian Piper and her project, The Mythic Being: I/You/(Her) (1974). The album featured his wife and collaborator Alicia Hall Moran as well as the artist Joan Jonas. The recordings combine samples of Piper’s voice and fragments of her writing and parts of Moran’s own personal life in order to further Piper’s own questions surrounding the personal, the political, and the theatrical. Inspired by Brazilian composer Hermeto Pascoal and the voices of political leaders, Moran adapted this “orchestrate” method to jazz to bring forth the melody of Piper’s voice on the tracks “Break Down” and “Artists Ought to Be Writing.” On May 20, 2005, Moran staged the theatrical jazz suite titled Milestone based on the project to mark the opening of the Walker Art Center’s expansion.
Early Composing for the Arts: Joan Jonas, Glenn Ligon, and Kara Walker
In the early 2000s, Moran began collaborating with visual and performance artists. Working with Joan Jonas, an esteemed performance artist, Moran scored The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things (2004). Conceived and directed by Jonas, the piece focused on the life and work of art historian Aby Warburg (1866–1929). In 2008, Moran collaborated with Glenn Ligon to score The Death of Tom, Ligon’s re-enactment of novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe. In the 23 minute piece, Moran provided an improvised score based on the Vaudeville song “Nobody” by Bert Williams. In 2009, Moran and Hall Moran collaborated with Kara Walker for National Archive Microfilm Publication M999 Roll 34: Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands: Six Miles from Springfield on the Franklin Road. The 13 minute video interprets an African American family retelling of a violent attack by a white man who burned down their home.
Special Projects
In 2015, Moran exhibited the first of his “set” sculptures, STAGED: Savoy Ballroom I and STAGED: Three Deuces, at the Venice Biennale. Engaging directly with history, Moran’s “sets” explore African American musical history, space, and the sites of two famous jazz venues in New York, the Savoy Ballroom and Three Deuces. Moran’s set for the Savoy replicated the scalloped curved wall bandstand with Vlisco Dutch wax fabric. The Three Deuces set included a corner with the venue’s signature padded walls. Each set represents jazz as both an architectural environment, a cultural phenomenon, and a response to racism and Jim Crow–era politics that made these segregated and integrated spaces necessary. During the Biennale, Moran and his band, the Bandwagon, performed Work Songs which sampled audio from Angola Prison work songs, exploring the roots of the genre and the creation of jazz. In 2018, Moran’s first solo museum exhibition was held at the Walker Art Center. The exhibition included excerpts from his collaborations with visual and performance artists, works on paper, the two of the STAGED sets as well as a newly commissioned work, STAGED: Slugs’ Saloon. Unlike Savoy and Three Deuces, Slugs’ and Slugs’ Saloon are not architecturally unique. STAGED: Slugs’ Saloon features sawdust and winged mirrors to replicate the narrow space of the original venue.
Recognition
Moran was honoured by the Jazz Journalists Association for the “Best Debut Recording” for his first album, Soundtrack to Human Motion (1999). In 2007, Moran was awarded a USA Prudential Fellowship in Music, and in 2010 Moran received a MacArthur Fellowship in Music Performance and Composition. The following year, Moran was appointed as Artistic Advisor for Jazz at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and was later appointed Artistic Director for Jazz. In 2014, Moran was nominated for a Grammy for All Rise: A Joyful Elegy For Fats Waller, and Moran scored the film Selma, which was given the award for “Outstanding Score” by Black Reel in 2014.
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