Jazz Articles about Jason Moran

Jason Moran: Artist in Residence

by Joel Roberts
October 14, 2006

While most jazz artists, even the great ones, tend to stick to the tried and true, Jason Moran has risen to the upper echelon of the jazz world by constantly challenging his audience. Listeners never really know what to expect from the 31-year-old pianist except that it's going to be fresh, intellectually rigorous, exceedingly of-the-moment music drawn from a variety of unanticipated sources. His latest release, a followup to last year's blues-inspired Same Mother, is no exception. ...

Jason Moran: Artist in Residence

by Mark F. Turner
October 2, 2006

Art, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, and Jason Moran's Artist In Residence is no exception. An enigmatic traditionalist, Moran has produced releases that are as diverse as his reinterpretation the blues on Same Mother (Blue Note, 2005) or his conceptualization of the soundtrack of daily life on his debut, Soundtrack to Human Motion (Blue Note, 1999). With this ambitious seventh recording, he again brings fertile ideas to fruition with pieces resulting from recent commissions he accepted ...

Jason Moran: Artist in Residence

by Paul Olson
September 11, 2006

Pianist/composer Jason Moran has never made the same album twice. While his Bandwagon group with bassist Tarus Mateen, drummer Nasheet Waits and, of late, guitarist Marvin Sewell, remains a constant presence on all but his 2002 solo record Modernistic, it's the only constant in a recorded career marked by a restless insistence on trying out new things.Artist in Residence once again puts Moran in unexplored territory. It collects various commissioned pieces from Minneapolis' Walker Art Center, the Dia ...

Jason Moran's Bandwagon Packs Kennedy Center

by Franz A. Matzner
March 5, 2005

The year separating their debut at the Kennedy Center Jazz Club and last week's performance has been a good one for Jason Moran and his Bandwagon trio. The success of their album Live at the Village Vanguard secured Moran's standing as one of jazz's ascending stars, and the follow-up quartet release Same Mother has served to confirm Moran, Waits, and Mateen as musicians dedicated to pushing their own limits.

It has become almost impossible to open a ...

Jason Moran: Same Mother

by Mark Sabbatini
February 12, 2005

Jason Moran is among a handful of modern pianists whose work often demands a listen as soon as it's released, since most other players will be trying to imitate it tomorrow. He doesn't quite meet those expectations on Same Mother, an album heavy on blues and soundtrack elements that represents his sixth project as a leader. Partially this is his emphasis on a classic down-home Texas feel, but there's also a sense of a highly tuned engine coasting at a ...

Jason Moran: Same Mother

by John Kelman
February 11, 2005

Contrary to popular opinion, the blues transcends structured musical form. Rather, it is a feeling that imbues, a deep and dark sense of despair that pervades. Regardless of the context, there was always something distinctly blue about the way Miles Davis approached every phrase. Similarly, while his music in no way relates to conventional blues form, Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stanko's work has a certain melancholy that gives it a distinctly blue feeling. All that just goes to show that, contrary ...

Jason Moran: Same Mother

by Mark F. Turner
February 4, 2005

Jason Moran and his Bandwagon (bassist Tarus Mateen, drummer Nasheet Waits, and newcomer guitarist Marvin Sewell) speak the blues in fine jazz form on their new adventure, Same Mother. The title comes from a comment Moran's wife made in a discussion about tap dancer Savion Glover which states “...that jazz movement and blues movement in dance both came from the same mother."

Though progressive, Moran's playing has always been grounded in the fertile roots of both idioms. Always ripe with ...