Composer, pianist, and interdisciplinary artist Jason Moran joins Philip Bither, the Walker’s McGuire Director and Senior Curator of Performing Arts, to talk about their shared appreciation for the artistry and influence of Pulitzer Prize–winning composer and saxophonist Henry Threadgill.
Since he was a young musician, Moran has followed Threadgill’s career, in recent years performing with him in various concert and recording situations. In November 2014, Moran curated Very Very Threadgill, a two-day festival tribute to the pioneering artist, presented at Harlem Stage, New York, for which more than forty accomplished musicians spanning several generations came together in ensembles, mirroring the specific Threadgill historic groups, including Air, Very Very Circus, Sextett, and Society Situation Dance Band. The event attracted acclaim from audiences, musicians, and critics alike and was also featured on National Public Radio’s Jazz Night in America.
In part inspired by Moran’s Threadgill tribute, the Walker presented two-day festival in 2019 that opened on February 15, Threadgill’s 75th Birthday, with more than twenty Minnesota-based musicians playing a wide range of Threadgill compositions in different configurations to a packed house. The following night’s lineup included both New York City’s Harriet Tubman, a trio made up of past Threadgill sidemen (J.T. Lewis, and Brandon Ross, along with bassist Melvin Gibbs), and Threadgill’s own rigorous, working quintet Zooid.
Over the years Bither has curated and produced several ambitious projects with both Threadgill, dating back to the mid-1980s, and with Moran, beginning in 2005 for the commissioned project Milestone (with conceptual artist Adrian Piper). Recent Walker projects with Moran include the 2018 commission The Last Jazz Fest, with the Bandwagon (Nasheet Waits and Tarus Mateen) and video artists Ryan Trecartin and Lizzy Fitch, a performance presented in conjunction with the artist’s touring exhibition Jason Moran, also organized by the Walker.
Philip Bither (PB)
Jason? Hey, thank you so much for taking this time. I know how much you’ve got going on right now. I want to start with how you came to know Henry Threadgill’s music. I know your dad had some Threadgill records and turned you on to his music. You’ve said before that you heard something very different as soon as you listened to it. But, at that time, you had already been listening to John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, and others. What was it in Threadgill’s work that sounded different than other things you’d heard?
Jason Moran (JM)
When I heard his music, it was also around the same time as some Tim Burton movies were coming out and there was some sort of circus whimsy, dirge-like funeral sound, brass, I don’t know—but that was only some of the pieces. I was really attracted to the things that sounded cinematic. And also they hinted that there was another world that existed in music that I hadn’t heard yet, and was in stark relief from, the very straight-ahead things I was hearing.
Yeah, that first record that my dad had, which really made that impact, was Too Much Sugar for a Dime [1993]. Yeah, that record, I don’t know, it just was different. I never forgot how I heard it. And then I started trying to write like it while I was at Manhattan School of Music. I remember this very pivotal moment at school when I’d written a piece in which I was trying to mimic a Threadgill sound. The students weren’t getting it, and I couldn’t explain to them what I was hearing. And then I said, “You know, like a Threadgill song.” And they said “What’s that?” And then I was like, “Oh, okay. So this is just another space.”
PB
It was a bold statement that you’ve made numerous times in the past—that Henry was really your favorite composer out there. Which of course, given all the music you’ve absorbed in your life, that’s saying a lot. Is there anything further you’d want to say as to why his music stands so tall for you compositionally?
JM
Look, first, anytime anyone says anything like that, they’re making the statement that they believe in, based only on themselves. And for me, it’s because Threadgill uses so many different tools for composition. They all come out sounding differently to me. The way he looks at history is also … it’s not museum-like. It’s more like it’s an active living thing that he wants to touch. When he plays Scott Joplin music …
PB
With Air and things.
JM
Yeah. But just those tools, they keep modifying. When I call him and talk to him about composition, he says, “Well, the new thing I’m working on is … ” and then he’s off to a really serious theory about what the next thing is. Even now, knowing him all these years and talking to him about the decisions he made, it was clear that he made choices that changed his entire life and they showed up in his music, and they kept just pointing him in different directions. From him making this bizarre arrangement of “The Star Spangled Banner” that got him sent to Vietnam to later playing a concert somewhere in India and people losing themselves over his music. So he moves there, you know …
PB
To Goa, right?
JM
Like he follows it and he has kind of lived a life that is, it’s very original. He’s an original personality and they’re very rare in the arts. And he did this before, and he and his colleagues, they did this before it was a trend. Here I’m thinking about the AACM [Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians]. They did it out of necessity and they did it out of self-exploration, community exploration, to become symbols. So they really stake it—they staked it with language and sound. And I think for black music, it’s just, it’s very rare that it occurs and without somebody seeking something else. They really were doing it for the good of the work. I hear that in those pieces, and I hear it in the way he plays. I hear that for all the different bands he’s had, and how he’s written for them. For me, that connotes the best.
PB
Of course, the AACM is highly acknowledged now, but when you think about those early years of the AACM and the range of iconoclastic geniuses that sort of bubbled forth from that moment and that Afrocentric, black-empowered community of artists, do you think this was due to the historical times, the location in the city, the segregated history and racial tension in Chicago, or all of those things
JM
Of course. Well, Chicago was the great stop for the Great Migration.
You know, everybody’s family comes from the South, Muhal Richard Abrams and Anthony Braxton, and I mean that’s just what it was. And Chicago really galvanized a lot of that blues relationship to a massive metropolitan city, a metropolis. And that comes across, you know. Threadgill and Braxton had the same saxophone teacher when they were young, so you knew that people were aware of each other and they were aware of who their peers were. They showed up to watch concerts together, and then they showed up to make concerts together.
And also I think they made decisions based on who was denying them, and whether it’s the big “O” Oppressor or whether it was a within the music business oppressor. And they’ve really set forth to find ways to promote each other and their own compositions and base it simply on that, and that takes community effort. Chicago is great for this, and it continues to be that same thing that lets an artist like Theaster Gates be prominent. Theaster knows Roscoe Mitchell. No, that stuff gets handed down, that kind of attitude about a city and about a space.
PB
I was reading some interesting interviews with Henry about how his influences extended far beyond that rich history of improvised music and jazz, but he was playing in marching bands to make money. He was deep into Delta blues and what Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf were doing, and others. And then he was discovering Balinese ketjak and Japanese kabuki and a whole range of global sounds. But also Ralph Shapey was apparently at the University of Chicago [1964–2002] and in the mid-1960s Henry was studying vanguard 20th-century classical music as well as being influenced or getting to meet composers like Varese and Schoenberg, along with many others who were brought in by the University’s Contemporary Chamber Players. Do you hear that in his music, that whole range of influences?
JM
Well, yeah. Even he talks about when he was a kid, trying to learn those boogie-woogie piano songs. And I mean, yeah, you do. I remember being at the Walker—it was Kara Walker’s opening [2007]. And so Kathy Halbreich [Walker director at the time] had driven Alicia [Hall Moran] and I back to the hotel and she said this thing about Kara, which was like, “Well, you know what’s also great beyond Kara’s technique is really her understanding of art history.” And those levels of understanding about how sound is made, and the architecture behind the sound, is what you also feel and understand in Threadgill’s music. So it’s the understanding of counterpoint, but it’s various kinds of counterpoint. It’s not just harmonic, it’s rhythmic counterpoint that he’s extremely invested in. And so he really thinks about these things and they show up, and when he really dives into one of those concepts, then you hear this work or these kinds of phrases that don’t exist anywhere. He also then puts some kind of impediments in front of the improvisers too. So you can’t walk into his music, trying to play all of your phrases of music that you played on everybody else’s songs.
He sets up a different kind of exchange of equations, so that you have to really pause every once in a while. Which is why I think when Threadgill plays on his own music, you hear these beautiful gaps of silence as he considers where the next step is going to be.
PB
It’s like that with his band Zooid, who we featured here in the second night of our celebration. They play an interval based on the harmonic system that Henry devised. Not being a composer, I’m not sure I quite fully understand it, but to hear other musicians talk about that unique, interval block structure with different blocks assigned to each player, which seems to allow for not only clearly defined rules but also an openness somehow, the combination of that.
JM
Exactly. I don’t know if he uses the phrase, but the way I understand it, when he was showing it to me, was like “families of intervals.” Right? So these intervals have a relationship because they’re in the same family. And then two minutes later, you’re in another view, visiting another family. So then it makes you play a different way or move a different way. And like these are amoeba that keep moving around each other and all of a sudden they become synchronized, and then you’re left wondering … and then they move that way.
He and I talk about ballet a lot, and there are moments when dancers are running against each other or not in sync. Then the moments when they synchronize, when everyone then knows, “Okay, this has all been composition.” Even though maybe I thought that there was nothing, there was no choreography, now it’s all lockstep together. That always kind of amazes me when he decides to pull that out. And he never stays on an idea too long.
PB
Yes.
JM
His Aquarian nature.
PB
It’s interesting when we’ve talked about these cycles and different bands he’s gone through, it feels like he’s very clear in his mind about when he’s taken it as far as it can go and then he shifts. He says he gets a signal to know it’s time to shift into a whole other structure that was created for a new thing
JM
Yeah, yeah, that’s helpful. Look for all of us young musicians who get stuck in our bands, which is part of the restlessness I have is because I’ve watched enough of my heroes figure out that there were multiple modes that they should be functioning in. And they might not all hit the stage with the same frequency as others, but you have to continue to, to kind of reconfigure yourself and the sound you make so that there are other outputs.
PB
Well, you both have done that so beautifully in your careers. You were a fan for many years before you ended up playing in his Double-Up band. Was there a shift then? Was it different than what you anticipated it might be as a musician playing with Threadgill in one of his groups, versus as a listener and admirer from afar?
JM
Well, the music is hard. That’s one part and it takes a lot of rehearsal. I would say in recent years I haven’t been in a band that rehearses as much as his.
PB
Really?
JM
Yeah, and you really only get a few chances at hitting it. When you make a record, he doesn’t do a second take of anything. So the concerts are really, they’re just one and done, so you really hope that you’re nailing it. But he’s also not concerned with that to a degree. I’d say he wants you to know how it works, right? He wants you to know how it feels. He wants you to find your flexibility in the system, and that you’re just one part of seven or eight other players.
And I think for me then figuring out where he wanted me to go ahead and where he wanted me to go, and kind of understanding that, and really trying to make sure that I could get to some of the sounds that he has in his mind because he plays really great piano as well. It’s intimidating because you know he has his ideas and then when he sits down and does it, you’re like, “Oh shit, okay then, now that’s intention.” I’m over here faking it, but he’s got intention in every kind of sound he’s trying to make.
PB
Several different people have told me he is a firm bandleader but he’s also caring and generous. How do you view that combination, a balance that can’t always be easy on him I’d imagine?
JM
When we were making the Very Very Threadgill festival, one of the things he always talked about was how he hired musicians, how historically he wants to hire personalities that are sometimes opposites of the other people in the band. So he needed somebody a little bit loose and a little bit crazy. Somebody probably very crazy too, and then somebody who was very strict. And so he’s also not only looking at the parts he’s writing, but he’s looking at the personalities of people that he’s pulled together.
And that makes for when you hear those bands or these records, like Just the Facts and Pass the Bucket [1983], what those records are. I mean, I know those people on those records—those people are beautiful. They’re really original people and original players, and you understand that a tribe works in a special way like that. In a community you have to have not everybody who believes just one thing, you need many beliefs for it to be a really beautiful choir, so he assembles like that too.
PB
He also seemed to open up or reintroduce jazz, if you want to use that term, to a whole new range of instrumentation. His interest in the cello and the tuba, and his invention of the hubcap instrument [a rack of vintage hubcaps that he called the “hubkaphone”], and other things. I know when I first started listening to him, that drew me right in because these instruments helped create such a different sound, one that I just wasn’t used to hearing that much in other people’s music.
JM
Mm-hmm, yeah. Also, as I got way into just recently this history of James Reese Europe [1880–1919], when Threadgill found that out, he’s like, “Oh man, you getting into that.” Because that’s the guy … because there’s something that Threadgill also really loves about how, let’s say, how funeral bands work around the world.
And what I hear [in Threadgill’s music] is a kind of softness of the bass. So when the tuba plays it, it doesn’t come out as this punchy thing. It comes out at this billowing sound, occupying all this frequency at the bottom. And so Threadgill has two tubas working together. He’s looking at the ideas that the music is mobile. And part of the reason he wasn’t writing for piano for a very long time was he hated the pianos that were in New York, in the clubs. But there’s this other part that is about the music and movement, that everybody up on the stage can move. The guitarists can move.
PB
You mean physically move?
JM
Physically move, yeah. And those instruments, he made that cool, right? Of course, you hear beautiful second line in New Orleans and how that works. But he just pulls it in another strain that also lets in the virtuosity of the instrument, rather than just boom, boom, boom, boom.
PB
Right, yeah. I found it wonderful for Henry that he won the Pulitzer Prize for Music [2016] and finally received recognition from the so-called classical establishment, while at the same time he was being discovered by younger groups of musicians, even younger than your generation. When we did our tribute to Henry Threadgill at the Walker, the musicians ranged from ages 19 to 85. Is there anything you’d want to reflect on? Do you feel your festival helped introduce Threadgill’s work to new people?
JM
Yeah, the other part with that was to have people who had been playing Threadgill’s music along with people who may have loved it from afar but now could get on the stage and make the music. But also I think we attracted and involved a certain strain of musicians who are into Threadgill and his offspring.
A lot of us come from that well, from his well. Also, Threadgill stays in the street going to hear bands, young bands. So he’s in the audience. He was ready to talk to people. He’s curious and there are musicians that always kind of like that. Muhal was like that, Andrew Hill was like that … people who support that there will always be a need for the musician who has decided to take another road, that they show their support because they know it’s important to be out there because they also benefited from people coming to hear them play. And I think he understands that and he gives back very generously to lots of young musicians, myself included, just to kind of prod us and also give us energy to move forward.
PB
You’ve done such a wonderful job of both pushing your music and interdisciplinary practice forward, while at the same time acknowledging elders and important people who have come before. It very much feels embedded in who you are as a person. Is that a difficult balance to hit? In earlier eras, it felt like people needed to reject those who came before in order to make a mark with their own statement and things.
JM
Well, fortunately, the great examples that I’ve studied with, and also the people I’ve studied with who had been in my family, that’s just kind of what it is. You understand your relationship to your ancestors and you tackle and wrestle with it all the time. And I think for artists, it’s important to consider that, and especially for black artists making sound in America, right? Because the sounds that have come from the country, from the community, have also changed the sounds of the world, but only after 350 years of oppression. So there’s something that we cherish about writing something into the history books because this all can be new and it can all be documented and it can all be performed by us and recorded, and archived. I consider that really important. And I don’t find anything odd about ever touching somebody else’s cannon. So watching McCoy Tyner touch Duke Ellington’s cannon, or Thelonious Monk touch Duke Ellington, while watching Duke Ellington touch James P. Johnson … so I just have always watched these people touch one another, and also, if they had a moment, lift them up.
My teacher Jaki Byard was with Erroll Garner and Earl Hines—and these people, they’re legends. So I feel like my relationship to my teachers—Andrew Hill and Muhal and Jaki and say Charles Lloyd or Cassandra Wilson, people who kind of continue to push—they let you know that the ancestors are with you. They don’t ever act like you’re out here on your own.
PB
Right.
JM
That is not a privilege that I want. [both laugh]
PB
Could you speak just a little bit further about the relationship between blackness and vanguard music in America jazz, if you want to use that term, and the connection points. And I’m also curious about in this renewed time of racial strife, or maybe it’s just that white people are now recognizing that it’s always been there, but just what’s come out of the music, the black music of what we refer to as jazz and its relationship to black history in America and oppression?
JM
Well, you know, literature can be one thing, right? So Tony Morrison can tell us what we need to know. Frederick Douglas can write about his experience. We could read Rita Dove, and we can love James Baldwin. And then there’s a place where the unexplained goes, and for me it goes into music because it’s language-less. It is a language but it also maneuvers in a way that touches on emotion more frequently and it’s hard to determine how it does that. That is also a powerful place and it’s been the place, I would say—I mean, I’m making this part up—but it’s been the place where folks of color in America have had to find some kind of solace. Because we needed that kind of balm. What is gospel music, blues music, hip-hop music, R&B? And the country does not understand its relationship to its fruit. So as an adolescent country, we’re still trying to understand what’s even in our ground. We still don’t even really know that yet.
And so the music then becomes a thing that continues to go around the world and also shares the testament of what has happened on this land. And it’s one of our greatest exports—the sound that comes from the country and the way that it infects others, you know? And that part has to continue to be documented, right? You still have to give people space and stages and time to explore and resources, and then they die. And then the next group comes along. Hopefully, there are enough crumbs still around that a hundred years later they can say, “Oh, you know, James Reese did all this a hundred years ago and died by the hand of his own drummer.”
So what is that story, right? Can we dive into that a little bit more? And musicians like us, I think, have no problem trying to continue to find answers that help give us a way to look forward through music.
PB
Another thread of this publication, besides exploring the relationship between blackness and vanguard music, is unearthing the interdisciplinary nature of what many of these leading artists from this period of the ’60s and ’70s and their relationship to poetry, theater, performance, ritual, theatricality, and other things. And of course, your work with us over the years has been so beautifully embracing of these different disciplinary motivations and inspirations seen in the commission projects we’ve done together. Might you have any thoughts about some of these figures—whether it be Cecil Taylor or Henry Threadgill or Wadada Leo Smith, Ornette Coleman or Art Ensemble of Chicago—and their relationship to a sort of innate or maybe studied interdisciplinarity?
JM
I think artists don’t consider where the limit is. The limit will exist in your technique, and then at some point you might look to the side and see that, “Oh, somebody else has found that same limit within their practice.” At those points, then maybe it’s the time to link up. We don’t consider Duke Ellington that way, but I think the way he worked, from the dancers, costume designers, from the sets, from the music, and from how he openly invited everybody onto the stage, and then vice versa, that music went out into everybody else’s world. I mean he’s famous too, but there’s something that he kind of left open. And how do you make music that can stay open enough for people to find themselves in it? And not only other listeners, but its other artists as well.
And I know that that’s been important for me to understand living in New York, especially that there were so many creative folks that were right next door, that in the music conservatory we would not discuss. There was a problem in that, that I would have to figure out after I left school. And part of what Alicia and I have figured out was that these relationships would work just as well as you work with your favorite musicians, and finding writers and artists and choreographers to collaborate with will make for a more fruitful space.
PB
Both you and Henry seem drawn to collaborations beyond the musical realm. I know Henry has worked with visual artists, puppeteers, theatermakers, and media artists. When you work as a curator vs. a composer or musician, is that work you consciously try to encourage in your curatorial work at the Kennedy Center or the Armory, putting combinations together and bringing people to light who audiences don’t know yet or placing artists in spots that you wouldn’t expect them in a so-called jazz series, and so on?
JM
Right, and you have to always consider that there’s a part that people might understand when the work is in relationship to another. Sometimes it’s great on its own, and sometimes it needs links and then that can maybe take the audience to another place, but we won’t know until it hits the stage.
PB
That seems a perfect place to end. Jason, thank you so much. This has been excellent.
JM
My pleasure.
Jason Moran, interview by Philip Bither, in Creative Black Music at the Walker: Selections from the Archives, ed. Simone Austin and Danielle A. Jackson, Vol. IV of the Living Collections Catalogue (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2020). [FINAL URL HERE]
Philip Bither is the McGuire Director and Senior Curator of Performing Arts at the Walker Art Center, where he has commissioned more than 170 new works in dance, music, and performance, among other accomplishments, over the past two decades. Prior to this Bither served as director of programming for the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts and artistic director of the Discover Jazz Festival, Burlington, Vermont; and as associate director and music curator of the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York.
New York–based jazz pianist, composer, and visual artist Jason Moran was named the Ford Foundation’s Art of Change Fellow in 2017, with his wife and collaborator Alicia Hall Moran, and a MacArthur Fellow in 2010. He is the artistic director for jazz at the Kennedy Center, New York, and currently teaches at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. To date Moran has produced more than ten albums and six film soundtracks, among other projects and performances. His work was featured in the 2015 Venice Biennale; and in 2018 the Walker organized Moran’s first solo museum exhibition, which toured nationally.
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