Going Out

By Paul Robicheau

As a child growing up in Houston, Jason Moran hated playing the family piano that now graces his Manhattan home.

“My mother had this bowl of potpourri on top, and I just dumped the whole thing on the inside, hoping it would corrupt the strings and the action, and I wouldn’t have to practice anymore,” says Moran, now 36. “But that didn’t work. The potpourri is still sitting at the bottom.”

Luckily, he was drawn to the piano at age 13 after hearing Thelonious Monk’s “’Round Midnight,” sensing a connection between the jazz icon’s rhythms and hip-hop. “It was really the epiphany that shifted everything, the focus of my life,” Moran recalls. “People talk about how Monk composes space… he would edit himself in a way that lets everything breathe.”

Today, Moran leads the Bandwagon, one of the most dynamic trios in jazz, reveling in cross-genre juxtapositions and earning a 2010 MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” to pursue his vision. Among his recent projects is In My Mind: Monk at Town Hall 1959, a multimedia performance reflecting on the life and music of his formative inspiration. The piece has its Boston debut at Jordan Hall on Feb. 2 and serves as the culmination of Moran’s current teaching residency at New England Conservatory.

“I resisted Monk for a long time—I felt it’d be too close to home,” Moran says from New York. The turnaround came in his discovery of rehearsal tapes for the Town Hall show, Monk’s first large-band outing. “I’ve used sounds of him tap dancing, sounds of him speaking, conversations he had with the arranger,” he says. “The canvas just exploded in a way that I thought could be really interesting.”

Moran also examines his hero’s North Carolina roots with video of the plantation where his great-grandparents were slaves, noting that their master’s name was Monk. “Monk is a cool-ass name, but it’s also a vestige of slavery, this scar of American history,” the composer says. “Most people, when they talk about Thelonious Monk, won’t talk about this part. They’ll focus on the music and how quirky and eccentric he is–and those are fine things to focus on. But he’s not just a musician. He’s a man.”

Personal context provides an essential element for Moran, who’ll supplement his trio with five of his NEC students as a brass section at Jordan Hall. “I want each of the musicians to be thinking about how important their personal lives are to their artistic practice rather than just focusing on technique,” he says. “Musicians often transcribe themselves or they transcribe other musicians on their instruments. I think, ‘Why don’t you transcribe your life? Who are the people in your life? What are the sounds in your life? How can they be manifested in the music?’”

When creating his pieces, Moran first traces his palette to his parents. “They inundated the household with the arts,” he recalls. “They always took us to the ballet or the museum or to symphony concerts.”

In turn, Moran taps inspiration across the spectrum, from Fats Waller (turning his stride-piano style into modern dance music with pop maverick Meshell Ndegeocello) to Brahms to hip-hop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa. He named his Gangsterism composition series after a word in a painting by neo-expressionist Jean-Michel Basquiat. His superlative 2010 album Ten includes a rumination over a buzzing loop of Jimi Hendrix feedback, while another album features a track responding to the cadence of a woman speaking Turkish on the phone.

Most of these conceptual flights wouldn’t click without the combustible interplay of his trio, comprising bassist Tarus Mateen and drummer Nasheet Waits. “It’s like an amoeba—it keeps shifting its form, but the chemistry never changes,” Moran says. “They’re not hampered by gravity. It took a long time for me to get used to them.”

Moran, who’s worked with artists from Cassandra Wilson to Charles Lloyd, adds of the Bandwagon, “It prepped me for situations where I’d play with Wayne Shorter, who’s also of this mind-set, where he’d say, ‘Jason, you can look at all the music, and we might just play one measure of the music, and then we just go swimming.’”

Jason Moran plays at Jordan Hall on Feb. 2.