164: Jason Moran

Pianist, composer, conceptual artist, educator and public intellectual Jason Moran is incredibly prolific. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2010, is the Artistic Director for Jazz at The Kennedy Center and teaches at the New England Conservatory. He has released 15 solo albums (nine of them on Blue Records, and more recently on his own Yes record label, which he runs along with his wife, vocalist Alicia Hall Moran). He has scored a handful of films including Ava Duvernay’s Selma, and most recently her documentary 13th. He’s also been a valued sideman and collaborator to other great jazz artists, including Greg Osby, Cassandra Wilson, Charles Lloyd and Christian McBride among many others. 

Moran has had shows at the Venice Biennial, Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN), The Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston, MA) Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus, OH) and most recently the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, NY. His work explores the interconnectedness of jazz, history and physical space. He is in the midst of curating what will be a permanent exhibition at the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Corona, Queens. 

I can’t think of anyone I would rather talk to right now than Jason Moran. Here we consider so much about history, and so much about the present moment in our country. The conversation is as deep as it is wide, and along the way Jason considers “truth versus passion”, promoting the “Freedom Principle”, America’s unfortunate way of forgetting the past, what happens when innovation becomes rhetoric, what it means for African American musicians to move freely “from the stage to the table”, the power dynamic in choosing repertoire, how Thelonious Monk and KRS-1 are similar, growing up in Houston among a generation of jazz innovators, what we still have to learn from Louis Armstrong, and what it means to be the “personal embodiment of your history”.

Skyping with With Jason Moran in June, 2020.

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