The Decade In Review: A Rebuttal On Jason Moran

You may remember that whole Most Important Albums of the Decade discussion we had last week here at A Blog Supreme, in reference to the All Songs Considered feature. It didn't seem like we had done enough thinking about the great jazz of the decade. So I asked the regular stable of bloggers supreme to help fill in the gaps. First up: NPR senior producer Walter Ray Watson takes exception. —Ed.

Well, Patrick, your note about how free jazz is stealing from Main Street is all well and good. Yeah, it's making in-roads into more commonplace material for inspiration and discovery, uh huh, and you elect pianist Jason Moran's Black Stars as a representative. Admirable choice and argument: Sam Rivers holds his own, and his art and experience combines with Moran's into something entirely new on that album.

I bet you'd say as much about Miss Circe's gin. But hold on, partner.

I think Moran's Artist In Residence is a stronger portrait of the artist as a leading voice of the "oughts." Check out "Break Down," as his thesis statement:

"Break Down," from Jason Moran, Artist In Residence. Jason Moran, piano; Marvin Sewell, guitar; Tarus Mateen, bass; Nasheet Waits, drums; Adrian Piper, voice.

Purchase: Amazon MP3 / iTunes

 

Moran and his Bandwagon trio cook up a heady groove, sampling Adrian Piper's voice as a percussive and chordal trigger for this romp. But this ain't just a mad professor's nutty lab experiment.

Subsequent tracks that use Piper's voice, or even the sound of a pencil scratching across paper, establish Moran as an important artist in our midst. Not only is he a practitioner who reinvents stride piano with both ferocity and restraint, but also someone who takes materials from his own environs — the studio and live techniques of the hip-hop generation. Moran makes new applications for Grandmaster Flash, Pharcyde, Public Enemy, and yes, yes y'all, Afrika Bambaataa's scratch-centric, beatbox friendly, and bass-heavy music. It seemed to lose its way for some of us after high school, or at least by the down payment on the first house, but he uses it to impressive effect here.

Anyway, Jason Moran belongs at the head of the class, and maybe even a full city block before you get to The Bad Plus. Audi.