Philip Bither, the Walker’s senior curator of Performing Arts, examines the trajectory of jazz visionary Jason Moran‘s career ahead of the artist’s first solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker-organized Jason Moran. This essay was first published in the exhibition catalogue of the same name.
“The possibilities are limitless” was Jason Moran’s concluding thought in the letter he sent to me in March 2003. He was outlining his hopes for the new commission that the Walker Art Center had just awarded him to create an interdisciplinary evening-length jazz performance inspired by the institution’s permanent collection. Looking back, his sentiment could have applied equally to the relationship that would develop over the next fifteen years between the artist and the Walker. The resulting theatrical suite, Milestone, which premiered in May 2005, is the type of boundary crossing achievement that shapes the future of both artist and institution.
Although the Walker had long been a multidisciplinary center committed to art forms that overlap and influence one another, the “new Walker,” which opened in 2005 with an expansion by Herzog & de Meuron, called for greater intentionality in its blurring of disciplines. The updated catalogue of the collection, Bits & Pieces Put Together to Present a Semblance of a Whole, featured for the first time essays on film and performing artists supported by the Walker (such as Moran’s work). Alcoves for music and moving image were built into new public spaces. Dance, music, and performance artists were given increased license to animate the museum galleries and common areas, and the Walker’s first dedicated stage, the McGuire Theater, offered a new platform for contemporary performing arts, often in the form of interdisciplinary collaboration.
Moran had already made a mark at the Walker in 2001, having appeared with his trio the Bandwagon (Tarus Mateen, bass, and Nasheet Waits, drums) and guest artist free jazz saxophone legend Sam Rivers for the first live performances of Black Stars (Blue Note, 2001), an album melding experimental sensibilities across generational lines. On the day of the concert, during an afternoon rehearsal break, I found Moran enmeshed in Sol LeWitt’s wall painting Four Geometric Figures in a Room (1984), originally commissioned by former Walker director Martin Friedman. Discussions of jazz, art, hip-hop, performance, and the audience-artist relationship ensued, revealing the depth of Moran’s curiosity and the breadth of his art and design enthusiasms. These passions were already evident in his subtle nods to painters Egon Schiele, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Robert Rauschenberg on his first recordings and in the modernist-designed piano stool/chair he often toured with.1 When Moran returned to the Walker in April 2002 to play in composer and saxophonist Greg Osby’s chamber jazz octet Symbols of Light, he and I continued to discuss the museum’s history, its collection, and the ideas embedded in artworks.
While on tour a year later, Moran came upon a retrospective of Adrian Piper’s work at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. He called this encounter with the conceptual artist, writer, and educator “one of the most powerful experiences I had felt in a museum in my life.”3 He was drawn to both the heat and the light of her work—bold, subversive, clever, and penetrating examinations of race, bigotry, and personal identity—and to her advocacy around the artist’s role in society. Piper’s use of her own life as material for her work, her attention to black identity, and her incorporation of text ran parallel to his inclinations to open up abstractions of contemporary jazz. He was drawn to her fierceness, to the “persistent jabbing” her work evoked.4 “It felt like she was saying … ‘wake up,’” he said. He knew then that he wanted to focus exclusively on Piper, in particular her work The Mythic Being; I/You (Her) (1974), in the Walker’s collection, for his commission.
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Detail of Adrian Piper’s The Mythic Being; I/You (Her), 1974
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Detail of Adrian Piper’s The Mythic Being; I/You (Her), 1974
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Detail of Adrian Piper’s The Mythic Being; I/You (Her), 1974
Moran contacted Piper, and she warmly welcomed him to her home in Massachusetts. They seemed to forge an immediate rapport, talking for nearly five hours. In the end, Piper allowed Moran to use her voice and her words for the basis of several of Milestone’s signature compositions. Moran regarded Piper as a kind of mentor, much as he had piano pioneers Jaki Byard and Andrew Hill. Piper’s interrogations of personal identity provided Moran with a creative road map. Puncturing the cliché of the cool male jazz musician who keeps his private life well hidden away, Moran decided to use his relationship with [then-fiancée and vocalist Alicia] Hall Moran as a theatrical frame. When the lights dimmed on the opening night of Milestone, Moran’s ambitions were clear. Hall Moran stepped out from the dark, singing something of a lament, reflecting on what her spouse far away might be doing at that moment. Further mixing autobiography, real-time reality, and fiction, a red dial telephone on the stage rang, followed by a recorded conversation between the couple about how the Walker gig was going, a quiet poignancy filling spaces between their words. I was cued to walk onstage as the call ended to give my standard welcome speech, as if no performance had already begun, as if no window had been opened onto the artists’ lives. And before my last word was spoken, the Bandwagon’s prerecorded musical theme—propulsive piano, harmonica, electronics, hip-hop beats, and sampled radio voices—blasted out in the auditorium, and the four musicians walked out in choreographed unison. They stood in a line under harsh overhead lighting, silently staring at the audience. It was a destabilizing image, suggesting a police lineup or a group of community protectors, and signaled that this was not going to be a typical jazz evening.
Moran was, in fact, determined to use Milestone to upend what he saw as the tired formula of the concert-hall jazz event. Using Piper’s transgressions of visual art protocols as inspiration, he realized that “each time musicians walk onstage it is theater.”5 Anything was possible. Milestone’s musical centerpiece, “Artists Ought to Be Writing,” was drawn from a speech by Piper urging artists to articulate their process and the intent of their work. Moran had already experimented with joining the spoken word to melody and improvisation, having sampled Chinese and Turkish voices in earlier recordings. But he had not done so with the English language or with the ideas of a fellow artist communicating something of a manifesto. Moran accompanied Piper’s words in multiple ways. He backed them with parallel chord changes, followed the cadence and tune of each spoken syllable, note by note, and launched into a piano solo based on Piper’s spoken melody with the words stripped away.
“Break Down” focused on just a few words from the same Piper speech. The sampled parts were repeated over a bed of propulsive funk injected with the bluesy, harmolodic6 edge of guitarist Marvin Sewell, who played with the Bandwagon as a guest artist for this work. Arresting black-and-white projections designed by the Walker’s in-house videographer Brian Dehler ramped up the energy of “Break Down” further, as words in different typefaces and at varying sizes and angles shot across the large screen in synch with the piece’s spiky rhythms.
Forty minutes into the concert, Moran announced an intermission and the band left the stage. As audience members started moving up the aisles, the Bandwagon reappeared behind a scrim on a raised platform outfitted to look like a backstage green room, with a table, chairs, and an upright piano. The musicians sat facing forward—the confrontation between artists and audience recalling Piper’s insistence on hanging her frontal portrait photos of people at eye level—as a recording played the layered, intimate flows and cross melodies of casual laughter, storytelling, and eating, further paralleling Piper’s use of autobiographical elements. As the nuanced live-concert aspects of Milestone continued, elements of electronic and sampled sounds integrated with the power of the quartet. After Moran’s solo, “On Cradle Song” (an homage to Carl Maria von Weber’s Cradle Song), the ten images from Piper’s The Mythic Being; I/You (Her) were projected at a large scale above the musicians’ heads, while an audio recording of Piper’s voice was heard.
Jazz concerts that incorporate other art forms have been generally overlooked by historians and shunned by conservative fans. Ornette Coleman’s historic spectacle at the 1994 San Francisco Jazz festival brought together video art, contortionists, and body piercers; Sun Ra and his Arkestra held home-spun Afro-Futurist tribal pageants; the Art Ensemble of Chicago performed in face paint and Nigerian dashikis; Thelonious Monk and Cecil Taylor danced in their performances, and Taylor included poetry readings. Even with these precedents, Milestone felt very new. Something of a leap for the artist and the institution, we all agreed early on to a full-fledged theatrical production mixing Moran and Hall Moran’s dramaturgical and directorial abilities with the creative contributions (projections, lighting, and scene design) of the Walker’s curatorial and technical staff. Piper herself, gracious and generous, flew to Minneapolis for the opening. At the same time that Milestone was a success with audiences and critics, it was an essential turning point for the artist. “Since working here and since studying Adrian Piper’s work … Alicia and I began to actively seek out other artists.”7 New collaborative relationships and friendships emerged with Joan Jonas, Glenn Ligon, Stan Douglas, Kara Walker, Theaster Gates, and others.
The following year, Moran’s 2006 Blue Note release (with collaged images of the Walker’s building on the cover), appropriately titled Artist in Residence, included four compositions from Milestone. Even jazz critics, typically suspect of the art world, were won over.8 Moran found himself applying his recently attained skills again, three years later, for a tribute to Thelonious Monk (a central influence on Moran) and his 1959 “large band” concert at New York’s Town Hall. Moran’s homage In My Mind: Monk at Town Hall 1959 (2007, initially commissioned by Duke University, SFJazz, Chicago Symphony Center, and the Washington Performing Arts Society) balanced the rich heritage of jazz with forward-looking musical and media elements. At Moran’s invitation, Ligon produced an untitled text painting that stressed through repetition the phrase “in my mind,” which was often used by Monk. Video artist David Dempewolf paired images of Ligon’s painting with video and audio excerpts of Monk and his arranger Hall Overton, acquired from the archive of noted photographer W. Eugene Smith.9 The Monk tribute, held in the McGuire Theater in May 2007, had a special resonance. Not only had the Walker presented Milestone four years earlier, but the institution had hosted Monk himself in 1964.
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Video installation as part of Moran’s mixed-media set. Photo: Galen Fletcher
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Moran’s exhibition was an interdisciplinary celebration of jazz. Photo: Galen Fletcher
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Among Moran’s collaboraters are visual artists Theaster Gates, Joan Jonas, Glenn Ligon, Julie Mehretu, Lorna Simpson, and Kara Walker. Photo: Galen Fletcher
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Sculptural vignette of the celebrated New York jazz venue Slugs’ Saloon. Photo: Galen Fletcher
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A selection of Moran’s most recent charcoal drawings and time-based media works. Photo: Galen Fletcher
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Moran’s sculptural vignettes, based on storied music venues from past eras, were his acclaimed contributions to the 2015 Venice Biennale. Photo: Galen Fletcher
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Score sheet for The Death of Tom, arranged by Jason Moran for Glenn Ligon’s abstractionist video recreation of the same name. Photo: Galen Fletcher
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Moran in performance on the opening night of Jason Moran. Photo: Cameron Wittig
Moran also appeared at the Walker for an emotional piano solo and spoken-word farewell for departing Walker director Kathy Halbreich in 2007, and a public talk turned lecture-demonstration that same year on the opening weekend of the exhibition Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love. In May 2015, Moran performed a concert of piano duos with fellow Houstonian Robert Glasper. While Moran and Glasper have both been widely noted for complicating the boundaries between jazz and hip-hop, the sold-out concert also explored earlier eras of jazz piano—stride, swing, bebop—and reinvented some pop and soul classics.
The relationship between Moran and the Walker Art Center moved to a new level with this exhibition, the artist’s first solo museum show, which also featured the commissioned, large-scale performance titled The Last Jazz Fest, in collaboration with video artists Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch and electronic musician DJ Ashland Mines (Total Freedom). A massive, metal set housed the Bandwagon on three separate stories, serving as something of a sculptural jazz shrine of the future—one that complemented the other three Moran STAGED creations that lived in the exhibition galleries. Both a bold critique and refutation of the nostalgic or overly commercial cultural corners that jazz has been relegated to in our times, The Last Jazz Fest’s sonic, textual, visual, and theatrical elements coalesced into the kind of commanding statement that Milestone hinted at thirteen years earlier. It had become abundantly clear that Moran’s leadership and vision were helping jazz reclaim a key place in the firmament of contemporary music, performance, and art.
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The Last Jazz Fest 2018 Photo: Bobby Rogers
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The Last Jazz Fest 2018 Photo: Bobby Rogers
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The Last Jazz Fest. Photo: Bobby Rogers
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The Last Jazz Fest 2018 Photo: Bobby Rogers
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The Last Jazz Fest 2018 Photo: Bobby Rogers
Notes
1 For Moran’s first recordings inspired by the works of Egon Schiele, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Robert Rauschenberg, see Soundtrack to Human Motion (Blue Note, 1998), particularly the track “Jamo meets Samo,” Facing Left (Blue Note, 2000) and Black Stars (Blue Note, 2001).
2 Jason Moran, public interview by the author at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, February 16, 2007, video recording, 1:24.
3 Jason Moran, interview by Willard Jenkins, “A Conversation with Jason Moran,” DC Jazz Festival Meet the Artist Conversation, NYU Washington, DC, December 1, 2016, video recording, 1:01.
4 Jason Moran, interview by the author, 2007.
5 Jenkins, “A Conversation with Jason Moran.”
6 “Harmolodic” is a term coined by composer/saxophonist Ornette Coleman that, among more expansive philosophical/musical meanings, can refer to style of electrified free-jazz funk that Coleman constructed in the 1970s and 1980s.
7 Jason Moran, interview by the author, 2007.
8 See for example, Will Lyman, “Jason Moran: Artist in Residence,” Pop Matters, September 25, 2006: “If major US Arts Institutions are ready, willing, and able to fund this kind of thing, then all the better. It’s the kind of thing that could give music in academia a good name. And it’s definitely the kind of thing that will give jazz a very good name.”
9 Martin Johnson, “The Jazz Standard,” New York Magazine, February 22, 2009.
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