Milestones and Memorials: Jason Moran on his First Museum Exhibition
Skip to main content
Closed for the day
Visual Arts

Milestones and Memorials: Jason Moran on His First Museum Exhibition

Jason Moran in his “set” sculpture STAGED: Slugs’ Saloon (2018)
Jason Moran in his “set” sculpture. Photo: Cameron Wittig, Walker Art Center

Spanning nearly two decades, five musical engagements, a residency, and his first ever commission, 2005’s Milestone, Jazz pianist Jason Moran’s relationship with the Walker Art Center marks a turning point this year: his first solo museum exhibition. Opened in April, Jason Moran  features Moran’s collaborations with other artists, including Joan Jonas, Kara Walker, and Carrie Mae Weems, as well as his own  “set” sculptures—homages to iconic jazz venues from the 1920s to the 1970s that also double as stages, or sets, for concerts. Moran’s creative process is informed by one of the essential tenets of jazz: the “set” for which musicians come together to collaboratively improvise, riffing off one another to create the musical experience. Further expanding on the idea of the riff or “set,” Moran debuts The Last Jazz Fest with his trio the Bandwagon (Taurus Mateen and Nasheet Waits) and Ryan Trecartin, Lizzie Fitch, and Ashland Mines (DJ Total Freedom) May 18 and 19. The performance examines jazz as freedom music, a model for democracy, and a prop while championing Moran’s collaborative impulse and introducing a fourth set that exists outside the walls of the gallery in the McGuire Theater.

Here, in a conversation with the  Walker’s Curator-at-Large Adrienne Edwards held one year before the opening of the exhibition Moran discusses Milestone, his love for conceptual art, and his inspirations and thought-processes behind creating his mixed media “set” sculptures.

 

Adrienne Edwards (AE)

I just realized that your show will open here one year from tomorrow. So today marks a milestone for you, Jason, which really goes back to the most important “milestone,” at least in relation to this show. I’ve come to realize over my career in the arts that most things that I really love have been instigated by the Walker. They somehow start here and they’re incubated here. In many ways, that’s exactly what happened for you in 2005 with a commission through the performing arts department. Will you tell us what Milestone, the piece, was like and what your process was for that?

 

Jason Moran (JM)

Sure. The invitation was pretty wild: “We’re going to invite you, Jason Moran, jazz musician, to come look at the Walker Art Center collection and decide what you want to do.” That’s a dream. But, you know, through going into art storage and seeing all these great works—Joan Mitchell, Frank Stella, Jasper Johns, and on and on and on—there was something that started setting into my mind around conceptualism. I was really having my first Sol LeWitt experience [Four Geometric Figures in a Room] and thinking about what it meant to see those lines and feel myself within those lines and the freeness that I felt in relationship to that. Then learning about Adrian Piper and her relationship to LeWitt, I was like, “Oh my goodness. Wait, do you have Adrian Piper in your collection at the Walker?” Then the investigation of reading her writing and looking at her 1974 piece, The Mythic Being; I/You (Her), kind of unlocked a lot for me.

 

AE

I’m always surprised at how many artists are profoundly inspired by LeWitt. We were chatting yesterday, and you said, “My process for making music is messy.” Do you think that the LeWitt, in terms of its structure and restraint, was aesthetically kind of a counterpoint?

 

JM

There’s one

As a pianist and as one who improvises and moves the line consistently, to know that there's someone there holding it down with the strong idea is like—it's like a good bass player in a band. That bass player is holding it down. They are the Sol LeWitt in the band.
phrase that Bill T. Jones said: “What is the art you make versus the art you love?” Now, the art I love is Sol LeWitt. The art I make is messy as hell, but Sol LeWitt is not that. Somehow he sets up the grid for you to be that other thing, so that you are in relationship to it rather than the mirror of it. As a pianist and as one who improvises and moves the line consistently, to know that there’s someone there holding it down with the strong idea is like—it’s like a good bass player in a band. That bass player is holding it down. They are the Sol LeWitt in the band. You can be as wild as you want to be as long as that bass player is there.
As a pianist and as one who improvises and moves the line consistently, to know that there's someone there holding it down with the strong idea is like—it's like a good bass player in a band. That bass player is holding it down. They are the Sol LeWitt in the band.

For me, he’s the most soulful—like southern soulful. Like a heartwarming, I’m-going-to give-you-a-big-hug when-I-see-you kind of cold conceptual artist. How did he do this with, you know, that pattern on the wall or on the ground down there with these white cubes? So that just always felt like home even though no music conservatory would ever tell you that you should feel at home with this grid, because they never talk about jazz that way.

Jason Moran and Adrian Piper at the premiere of Milestone, Walker Art Center, May 20, 2005

Traveling the world as a musician, I’d feel that when I would sneak away into museums and see reflections of what I wanted to be as a musician, almost better than some of the musicians I heard. I could see better through the work of, say, Adrian Piper the kind of musician I wanted to be. I saw her retrospective at MACBA (Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona) in 2004, and I felt like all of the work was just pointing dead in my face. Like the finger was pointing at me. I just wondered, as a jazz musician who is so addicted to abstraction, did I know how to point in someone’s face with my music? I was unsure whether or not I understood how to do that. So Milestone began this process of how to unfold some of these ideas around how to pinpoint emotion, pinpoint narrative, pinpoint history, and look at the question: how do you share that within the framework of a jazz concert?

 

AE

I want you to tell the story of how you met Adrian Piper and then how that influenced what ultimately became Milestone, the performance.

 

JM

Well, I asked the Walker if they could put me in touch with Adrian Piper. So they put me in touch with her assistant, and the assistant said: “Here’s the day. It’s May 15th at 1 o’clock at this address in Cape Cod. You cannot bring anything to write with or anything to record with. Just show up at 1 o’clock at this address.” I got there early, I watched my clock, and as soon as it struck one, I pressed the doorbell. When the door opened, here was this most soulful, warm human being, who gave me a big hug and welcomed me into her home. Then we spent the next five hours talking about music, talking people like Sol LeWitt, and on and on. I tried to soak up as much as I could.

There’s something about Adrian’s work about how to unveil your personal history which I thought was so indicative of her power as an artist to share her identity and also to share her parents’ identity. It’s very personal.

Entrance to the exhibition Jason Moran. Photo: Galen Fletcher for Walker Art Center

 

AE

Anything else you want to say about Milestone?

 

JM

You know, part of my practice is recording people’s language and then playing their language on the piano. Adrian was aware that I had been manipulating people’s words frequently.

 

AE

Hold up, say that again.

 

JM

What?

 

AE

You said recording people, playing people’s language on the piano.

 

JM

Playing people’s language on the piano: so that’s a melody, right? I mean, every person’s voice is in here, and when you call someone, of course they recognize your name on your phone now, but before that you recognized it by how their tone sounded, the rhythm and the cadence of their voice. So I started learning how people spoke on the piano. I would record people speaking in Turkish, Italian, English, Mandarin, and I’d learn how to play what they would say on the piano. So when I got to Adrian’s house, I wasn’t sure how she thought about how I manipulated people’s language. She said, “So, whatever you want to do with my voice is fine.” Knowing how strict an artist like Adrian Piper is around how her work is used, it was a badge of honor. So I made these works that are based on her language, and I cut it up.

 

AE

Now, in 2015, stages begin to appear in your work. I didn’t ever understand them as stages. I understood the process of the way in which you make music, meaning the coming together of various musicians in a public experience that is a jazz set, that you riff off one another, that there’s a process that happens that is unique and special to that occasion, to that event. Then I understood that what you were doing with visual artists were just sets under different terms, and then I came to understand these set sculptures or stages as yet another manifestation of this mode of working. It just has a different kind of output, so that you’re kind of circulating around, in the way that jazz itself, or any improvisation, has a structure inherent to it, that you were kind of setting that up and seeing what happens in that context. Are you composing sculpture with these works? I want you to talk about these and how they came about as well.

 

JM

I don’t know. But I’ll say that a lot of what a musician does is we listen to the sounds that happen in rooms. Whether it’s a recording studio or it’s live at a club or whatever. You go to church, you hear them sing from the balcony. You listen to them sing in a room. We listen to that as content, but musicians are rarely concerned about what the room is itself. Also, in America we tear down everything. The great jazz club, the Savoy Ballroom, no matter how great it was and thousands of people would show up here to dance, is no longer there in Harlem, and as a jazz musician that’s an important place.

It’s an important cultural moment that happens in Harlem, where people start to get together and swing dancing is birthed, and big bands and Ella Fitzgerald, they’re there working those rooms. But they don’t exist. For musicians we also consider where we play as a badge of honor. “What room did you get to play in? Oh, you played in your living room? Whatever.” But if you played at the Village Vanguard or if you play at Carnegie Hall, that’s a room to play in.

Carrie Mae Weems’s Lincoln, Lonnie, and Me – A Story in 5 Parts (2012), at left, with Jason Moran’s STAGED: Savoy Ballroom 1 (2015), in the exhibition Jason Moran. Photo: Galen Fletcher for Walker Art Center

It was something about this missing part of our history which I wanted to pull up, so that maybe then I could jump on that stage. Maybe it’s part of my own need to feel these places, because no one cared anymore. There were only a handful of photographs of the Savoy Ballroom. There are not thousands of images of it. I could try to reconstruct it in a way and pull it up from the ground, and then also embed sound into the piece itself and see what it charges.

 

AE

Do you think of them as memorials?

 

JM

Sadly, I think I do. Not only are they places where music has changed from these club’s walls. So Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and Max Roach, they all play in the Three Deuces of the 1940s. Bebop is born. America changes, not only because of the sound that they’re making within this small padded cell (as I call it), but it changes because the proximity to the audience changes, too. No longer does the band have to succumb to the challenge of making an audience dance. No longer are we a servant to you to dance. Now we can actually engage your mind. So Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and them, they start to change within the way that melodies work. Things that move and flutter around like a butterfly now are the melodic content rather than just a gesture. Now they’re the thing you’re supposed to hold onto. And they want to make you tired listening to them. They’re doing that on purpose. It is a code.

 

AE

Exhausted.

 

JM

Yeah. So I start thinking about the way they work in these rooms, that they’re also working in response to the room. Not only to each other and not only to the kind of stipulations that the unions forced musicians to work under in the 1940s and ’50s, but how do they work in a room that’s set up this way, where the ceiling is only like eight feet tall. That changes how you play, tremendously.

December 1965 issue of Sounds & Fury magazine featuring Slugs’ Saloon

 

AE

I wanted you to talk a little bit about the commission for the gallery that we’ll also be acquiring here at the Walker. You threw out this idea of wanting to do a piece that was somehow in memorial to Slugs’, and I was like, why “Slugs’?”

 

JM

Each venue has its own history, and unlike the Savoy Ballroom or the Three Deuces as clubs, I know a lot of musicians that played at Slugs’. Slugs’ was also kind of a meeting ground of a lot of minds but who were also little crazy in the ’70s. I just would hear musicians that I knew, older musicians who are now in their 70s talk about this place, Slugs’. They’d talk about the feeling, they talk about the intensity of the room. Even in a 1965 issue of Sounds & Fury magazine, musicians are recounting why they like playing in Slug’s versus other clubs, and it is really touching to hear.

 

AE

It was in Alphabet City on 3rd Street between Avenue B and C [in Manhattan’s Lower East Side]. It was crazy at that time. Not safe.

 

JM

Not safe, and that’s why it’s called Slugs’ Saloon. Saxophonist Charles Lloyd shares this story about playing in that club frequently, about the sawdust that was on the floor, about the conversations he had with one of his great friends, Bob Thompson, the painter, the writers he met in there. It was fertile ground, and so I’ve been considering it for some time. One of the great jazz murders happened in this club, the murder of Lee Morgan by his girlfriend. Came in and knew he was cheating on him and murdered him on the stage.

 

AE

Shot him. Yeah.

 

JM

It’s got quite a lure on it, and these spaces mean a lot. Of course it’s not there anymore.

 

AE

No. It’s a coffee shop now.

 

JM

I’m aiming to bring a version of Slugs’ to the Walker because I think that’s what the Walker needs.

Get Walker Reader in your inbox. Sign up to receive first word about our original videos, commissioned essays, curatorial perspectives, and artist interviews.