Music
The Rap on Jazz
Purists say the genre would be better off without the influences of hip-hop, but they’re music to Jason Moran’s ears.
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None of which is to say the average listener will recognize anything resembling hip-hop on Soundtrack to Human Motion. (Even Blue Note president Bruce Lundvall expressed astonishment when I told him Moran considered hip-hop a big influence.) Moran says that one track, “States of Art,” is his tribute to hip-hop, but you have to listen real closely to the bass line—and have a very schooled pair of ears—to hear what he’s talking about. Right now he’s establishing his jazz bona fides, which he figures will give him the credentials to pull off the jazz-hip-hop project that has been pushed back to some other time (and, says Lundvall, probably to some other label).
What Soundtrack does boast is a nervy recasting of the jazz tradition. “There’s something that’s missing from today’s music,” says Moran. “I’m not going to say who we were listening to earlier today, but it was on Blue Note, and we were just flabbergasted. It sounded like a record that was made forty years ago—and less adventurous!”
Soundtrack is nothing if not adventurous. Among its ten pieces are a cover of classical composer Maurice Ravel’s “Le Tombeau de Couperin” and a song called “Retrograde” that is actually jazz pianist Andrew Hill’s “Smokestack” played in reverse and then toyed with a bit. “I was playing ‘Smokestack’ backward and then I heard this melody and I taped it that way,” explains Moran. “Then I listened to it over and over again and transcribed the lines and started adding some other stuff until I said, ‘Man, this is a great piece!’”
Listening to music backward has long been a hobby of Moran’s. At first he’d sit at the turntable and spin the platter counterclockwise with his hand. Now he simply plays the record into a computer and then runs the sound file in reverse. This facility with technology distinguishes his generation of jazz musicians from their forebears. “In school I did a lot of computer work,” he says. “I’d take splices from Kurt Weill songs and loop them in bars, in beats of seven, trying all different kinds of things.”
Moran can go on and on in this mode—rapping, so to speak, about politics, herpetology (a childhood fascination), or a TV documentary on the fourth dimension he recently caught while channel surfing. “Jason is kind of an old soul,” says saxophonist Greg Osby, his mentor, bandmate, and producer. “Like the old people down South say, that boy’s been here before—he’s the reincarnation of somebody who has lived a rich life. He seems to know a lot more than someone his age should know. And he’s so curious. Every place we go, all over the world, he darts off to check out the architecture and the museums. You know, his parents just did him right. They had him and his brothers playing piano at a young age. They took them to the museums, the opera, the ballet. They exposed them to a lot of things. And the kids stuck with it.”
“They’re just strivers,” Moran says of his parents. “They never settle for mediocrity. There’s mediocre jazz, mediocre salesmen, mediocre golfers. If you want to be good, you have to really hone your skills. I think that was something we learned early on: You have to push. My mother, who’s a teacher, is part of the Urban League’s Scholarship Builders 2000 program [in which Merrill Lynch sponsors at-risk kids when they’re in elementary school and then pays for their college education if they graduate from high school on time]. Actually, right now she’s on the road taking the kids on a college tour across the U.S. She has always been a big education hound.” That paid off for the Moran kids, who are all overachievers. Besides Jason, who got his degree in jazz at the Manhattan School of Music, older brother Yuri is an investment banker and kid brother Tai is a golfer who hopes to join the pro tour next year.
The family is close, as is obvious when they attend one of Moran’s shows at Houston’s Gallant Knight. The point of the Blue Note tour is for its artists to play at venues that don’t usually accommodate jazz, and this one certainly fits the bill. Typically, jazz is performed in well-appointed nightclubs where natty college students, Japanese tourists, and the occasional businessman sit quietly at undersized tables sipping overpriced drinks. The Gallant Knight, by contrast, is an old-line R&B club whose confusing tripartite structure looks like it was designed not just by committee but by a committee that freely availed itself of the establishment’s liquor supply.
But the mazelike architecture gives the evening a nicely layered glow. In one corner is Moran’s family, beaming proudly as he plays. In another are some bohemian Houston teens nodding intently to the drummer’s every backbeat. By the bar are some long-lost buddies greeting each other with a shout and a hug. By the entrance, one would-be Casanova spots a shapely woman walking in the door, and before you know it, he and his shot of Scotch are on the move.
In most jazz clubs the incessant talker is a listener’s worst enemy, the target of numerous drop-dead glares. But here, the hubbub is fine. If you don’t like it, you can just hie off to another part of the room, where the listening’s better. In fact, the chattering makes the night even livelier—the musicians have something to compete with. And it affirms that jazz doesn’t need the sanctity of a silent audience to function as Art with a capital A. Osby’s darting, angular sax solos are pretty cerebral, and Moran’s hands pound out a few chords that you know have never before been heard at the Gallant Knight. But drummer Nasheet Waits and bassist Tarus Mateen keep the beat roiling below, no matter how knotty things get up top, so the music works fine on both planes: as the focus of the hard-core jazzheads who listen to every driven note, and as a backdrop to the swirl of camaraderie, seduction, and inebriation surrounding it.
It’s music with the immediacy of hip-hop and the dense real-time interaction of jazz. It’s music that fills the room, that seems to pay attention to what you’re thinking and how you carry yourself and then slyly suggests you think this and carry yourself like that instead. It’s music that moves you in both senses of the word, and if you wanted to, you could call it, yes, a soundtrack to human motion.
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