8 Days in the Life of Jason Moran
from the New York Observer
by: Devin Leonard

December 2,1999

Jason Moran, a 24-year-old jazz pianist was peering at the entrails of a dead cow. It was the sort of stuff that inspired him. The cow- or more specifically, parts of several chopped-up cow-was suspended in a row of clear plastic boxes in the Brooklyn Museum of Art. It was one of Damien Hirst's works in Sensation: Young British Artists From the Saatchi Collection, the show that triggered the wrath of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

Chris Ofili's elephant-dung-adorned depiction of the Virgin Mother, The Holy Virgin Mary, also impressed Mr. Moran. He found it hard to believe anyone has been offended by it. This wasn't the first time he had traveled from his Harlem apartment to see the show. Nor would it be the last. "I have to come back again, because my girlfriend hasn't seen it", he said. "But I don't know if she'll like it as much. She gets grossed out very easily." Mr. Moran arrived in the city in 1993 from Houston, determined to make it as an uncompromising jazz musician. Six years later, he has an album our from Blue Note (Soundtrack to Human Motion ) and praise form The New York Times, which called him "an obvious exception to the often-heard gripe that jazz hasn't produced individualists since the 60's." Mr. Moran, the son of a Houston investment banker, wore baggy jeans, a gray t-shirt and a charcoal sweater. He has the look of a young Tyrone Power with his trimmed moustache and arched eyebrows.

He had risen that morning at 8 A.M., turned on the Bloomberg station to check on his portfolio of technology stocks (Microsoft, Amazon.com, etc..), then set about his business. Lately, that meant preparing for his second album. He has been pushing himself to come up with something new. He even figured out a way to play his records backward using his computer. He has also started composing on graph paper, using obscure mathematical formulas. " Not all the experiments came out to my liking" he confessed, putting on his red parka and heading for the museum's exit.

He boarded the No.3 train. The subway car was filled with the smell of the gyro some guy was wolfing down. He got out at West Fourth Street and walked down Sixth Avenue. Over an apple turnover and a hot cocoa in a bagel joint, he said he was once a skateboard freak who loved the Dead Kennedys and drew countless pictures of skulls before his parents took the records away. But now is sometimes seemed to him that pop music was all about pimping and cars. "So many of those guys will just sell out as soon as they can" Mr. Moran said. "I'm about longevity. I want to do something people will still want to hear 50 years from now."

December 3, 1999

In his tiny, immaculate sixth-floor apartment at 135th Street and Riverside Drive, jazz pianist Jason Moran ushered Jacob Anderskov in for a lesson at 11:00 A.M. "Well, go ahead, warm up or whatever," Mr. Moran said. He was wearing a black and white sweater and the same baggy jeans he'd worn the day before.

Mr. Anderskov, a gangly 24-year-old Dane with a scraggly beard and rectangular glasses, looked confused. " You want me to play a tune?" he asked in heavily accented English.

"How 'bout a standard?" Mr. Moran replied. "A standard with a minute-and-a-half introduction." The Dame hunched over the keyboard and played an autumnal rendition of "My Funny Valentine." A flock of pigeons flew by the fire escape outside the bedroom window, against a gray sky.

"Yeah, sounds good" Mr. Moran said. "What do you need me for?"

Mr. Moran was being more than polite. He explained that Mr. Anderskov could get something more interesting if he flung aside the conventional stuff he had ingested and approached his material more ruthlessly.

"Don't even think about chords and scales anymore," Mr. Moran said. "Because you already have that down. That's old hat to you now. So now the thing to do is come up with a new way of looking at it."

Mr. Moran sat down at the piano and did the same song. There wasn't much left of Lorenz Hart and Richard Rogers when he was through, and that was the point; he'd taken shards of the time and reconfigured them into something that was his.

"Next time you go to a jam session and you have to play some corny song." Mr. Moran said, "you should try to jump really far afield into some really existential shit, so if somebody's walking by, the say 'Whoa, who is this cat?' Or maybe they'll say, 'Aw, he's just bullshitting.' Me, I'd rather they said I'm bullshitting."

Yeah," Mr. Anderskov said, grinning. "Yeah."

He paid Mr. Moran $60 for the lesson and asked if he could call for another. "Yeah, sure," Mr. Moran replied.

Later, Mr. Moran put on a brown leather jacket and cap and took the subway to the Sony Lincoln Square at West 68th Street and Broadway to catch the 3:15 P.M. showing of Being John Malkovic. He was in stitches through much of director Spike Jonze's madcap variations on the boy-meets-girl theme. During the closing credits, a spooky Björk song was playing, and Mr. Moran was taken by it.

On the way out of the theater, he met his girlfriend, Alicia Hall. "Hey, are you the famous jazz musician Jason Moran?" she said playfully, pulling him close and kissing him. Ms. Hall, a 26-year-old aspiring opera singer, had closely cropped hair and a diva's evocative eyes.

They rushed across Broadway to Tower Records. He searched for a Being John Malkovic soundtrack and looked pained when he discovered the CD wouldn't be available for two weeks. His girlfriend spent $110 on a stack of CDs- Alanis Morissette, Dawn Upshaw, Whitney Houston, the Eurythmics and several others. They headed down to SoHo for dinner. On the subway, they told their lovers' story about meeting four years ago at the Manhattan School of Music.

"He was the cutest boy there," she said.

"And she was the most happening woman there," he said.

She added that his career seemed to just take off before he even graduated. "he was like instantly..." Her voice trailed off, without mentioning his Blue Note debut recording, Soundtrack to Human Motion.

Now she was just about to graduate herself. Other than a grant to study voice in Italy, her future was uncertain.

December 4,1999

Jason Moran, the jazz pianist, was fighting through the crowds on Canal Street. It was about 2 P.M., and he was trying to keep up with the saxophonist Greg Osby, who needed new gloves and a scarf after he lost his luggage on his way back from a European tour with three other saxophonists.

Mr. Osby, in baggy jeans and a black leather jacket, rolled his shoulders like a bad-ass as he negotiated his way through tourists, bums, Chinatown locals, couples pushing strollers.

"Phew, what's that smell?" Mr. Moran said, wrinkling his nose.

"Trash-truck juice," Mr. Osby deadpanned. Mr. Osby, 39, enlisted Mr. Moran for his band four years earlier when the pianist was shy of 21. He produced Mr. Moran's first compact disk and has been his professional mentor. Mr. Osby frequently changes sidemen, but Mr. Moran has stayed. "He's like a hangnail," Mr. Osby said. He's like a growth."

Kay Vaughn, who managed both of the musicians' careers, was along for the shopping trip. Mr. Osby, one of his generation's top alto saxophonists, is a guarded, world-weary character, a contrast to the ebullient young pianist. A sideman with everyone from trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie to Tonight Show band leader Kevin Eubanks, Mr. Osby had fallen out of favor after attempting to fuse jazz with funk and even rap. He had an apartment in the city but spent much of his time at his house in southern New Jersey. "It doesn't matter where I live," Mr. Osby said dourly. "I could live in Anchorage, Alaska. Nobody calls me for gigs anymore."

"He'll learn", the saxophonists added, nodding at Mr. Moran.

Mr. Osby bought some of those Chinese balls you see people rolling between their fingers on the subway. He picked up a pair of gloves and a scarf. He was also interested in the Canal Street shops that sell everything from wing nuts to used laptops to karate videos, his and Mr. Moran's favorite. "Greg just likes junk." Ms. Vaughn laughed.

She said she was trying to get the two musicians booked on The Chris Rock Show.

"They're trying to do something different," Ms. Vaughn said.

"They really ought to," said Mr. Moran disapprovingly. "It's really become a Sambo festival."

They stopped at a flea market at Broadway and Grand Street, where Ms. Vaughn bought an enigmatic wood sculpture. Then the three wound up at the Olive Tree Café on MacDougal Street, a New York University student haunt, the kind where you can nurse a beer for hours and amuse yourself by drawing on the slate tabletops with chalk provided by the restaurant. The trio ordered shish kebabs and sketched silly pictures of each other.

Mr. Osby talked about how he had hired Mr. Moran for a European tour four years ago without hearing him play first. "I hired him based on his rap," said Mr. Osby. "He was one of us. He talked about all the right cats, the ones nobody else had heard of-Jaki Byard, Muhal Richard Abrams, Andrew Hill." Their first gig together was in Vienna.

Ms. Vaughn remembered how Mr. Moran's parents expressed their gratitude: "They called me and said, 'Thank you for taking our son on the road.'"

December 5,1999

"Jason's turning red!"

Jazz pianist Jason Moran stood in front of four strobe lights, his shoulders shaking, his hand over his mouth, laughing uncontrollably.

"Stop laughing," scolded his manager, Kay Vaughn. "Somebody slap him."

It was about 1:30 P.M. and Mr. Moran was being photographed in a low-budget studio high above West 18th Street with his mentor, saxophonist Greg Osby, and vibraphonist Stefon Harris, for the March cover issue of Jazziz. The magazine was doing a piece how three musicians were a part of a rebirth of Blue Note Records, harkening back to its glory days in the 60's when its stable of young lions-Herbie Hancock, Joe Henderson, Wayne Shorter, and Freddie Hubbard-churned out a catalogue that instantly achieved cult status.

It would be Mr. Moran's first national magazine cover. He was trading wisecracks with Mr. Osby and Mr. Harris, doing his damndest to stay loose.

It wasn't the easiest thing. Tom LeGoff, a wild-haired photographer in chinos and an oversize white shirt, had the trio standing in front of a yellow screen, shoulder to shoulder in gray shirts, black pants and polished square-toed shoes. It was your typical stiff-necked musical combo pose, a shot you might have seen on a Modern Jazz Quartet record 40 years ago. Only, these guys were not the M.J.Q. In fact, it soon became apparent that Mr. Harris' career was on a far different trajectory from those of the other two musicians.

Mr. Moran and Mr. Harris, a sunny, open-faced 26 year-old Albany, both attended the Manhattan School of Music and shared an apartment in Harlem for two years. But now Mr. Harris was being groomed for the kind of mainstream jazz career that Mr. Moran and Mr. Osby scorned. Indeed, while the pianist and saxophonist looked on jadedly, Mr. Harris' manager, Karen Kennedy, adjusted the vibes player's clothes and dabbed makeup on his face. She hovered behind Mr. LeGoff as he took pictures. "Stefon just headlined at the Village Vanguard," Ms. Kennedy told an onlooker proudly.

Mr. Osby finally lost his patience with the formality of the shoot. "Are these shots kind of boring?" he asked Mr. LeGoff. "They feel boring."

"Why can't you just shoot them talking to each other or something?" Me. Harris' manager chided in.

"Go ahead," said Mr. LeGoff, sounding a trifle exasperated. "Talk amongst yourselves."

The three musicians retreated into the dressing room. Mr. Harris and his manager stood on one side, discussing what clothes the vibraphonist would wear next.

Mr. Osby and Mr. Moran stood on the other side of the room talking about music and the media. The older musician had appeared on jazz magazine covers in America and Japan. He said they hadn't increased his bank account. Still, Mr. Osby didn't see why he had to appear on the Jazziz cover in such a stifled pose. "it just feels fabricated," he complained.

Mr. Moran didn't disagree. "Then again, don't listen to me," Mr. Osby said ruefully. "Look where it got me."

Mr. Moran donned a black Tibetan shirt and returned to the studio to be photographed alone. Mr. LeGoff put on The Full Monty soundtrack. The pianists responded with tai-chi moves, playfully lifting one foot off the ground and slowly moving his hands around his face as if he were about to deal somebody a chop.

The photographer snapped away enthusiastically. "You've never been on a major magazine cover before, not Downbeat or anything?" Mr. LeGoff asked.

"It's my first time," Mr. Moran replied.

"You seem really comfortable, if I may say so."

"You can't take it too seriously." Mr. Moran said.

December 6,1999

It was 8 A.M. and jazz pianist Jason Moran was sitting at the kitchen table in his sixth-floor, one-bedroom apartment at 135th St. and Riverside Drive, finishing his breakfast of waffles and sausage.

His girlfriend, Alicia Hall, wandered in, sleepily. "Jason, what's wrong?" she asked. " Are you nervous about something?"

"NO, I'm fine." The pianist snapped.

That wasn't entirely accurate. Mr. Moran had risen half an hour earlier, walked into his sparsely furnished living room and checked his stocks on Bloomberg Television. He was pleased to see Microsoft Corporation was up despite Bill Gates' trouble with the Justice Department's antitrust unit.

But now he was feeling rather anxious indeed. In only five days, Mr. Moran's trio would appear at Aaron Davis Hall in a two weekend tribute to Duke Ellington with two other esteemed jazz pianists, John Hicks and Randy Weston. Mr. Hicks was old enough to be his father. Mr. Weston was old enough to have known Ellington personally.

Mr. Moran knew that he couldn't give a lackluster performance with these guys looking on. So he had a lot of work to do.

The 24 year old pianist had selected his tunes; there would be no familiar war horses like "Take the A train." Instead, he had chosen five lesser-played pieces. "A Single Petal of a rose," "Black and Tan Fantasy," "Later," "Wig Wise" and "Fleurette Africaine." But he had to arrange them so they bore his own modernist imprint.

Mr. Moran disappeared into his living room closet packed to the ceiling with compact disks, tapes and records of everybody from Bela Bartok to Björk. When he found the right Ellington pieces, he sat down at his cluttered desk and recorded them on minidiscs, then played them repeatedly to absorb their rhythms and texture into his head.

After about two hours, he lugged his minidisc player into his bedroom, sat down at his upright piano and started reworking the Ellington tunes in his own image. At times his instrument roared majestically. Then there were moments when the young pianist toyed with Ellington's softer, pastel-hued harmonies.

His girlfriend, Alicia hall, lay on his wrought-iron bed, absorbed in a book about the I Ching. Finally, she nodded off, as rain beat on the window and Mr. Moran played on, communing with the spirit of the departed jazz master.

December 7, 1999

Jason Moran stared at the hieroglyphics on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There was a saxophonist with whom he recorded who notated his music with these 4,000-year-old symbols. "It's really deep," Mr. Moran said.

The 24-year-old pianist and his girlfriend of four years, Alicia Hall, were taking in the museums's Egyptian Art in the Age of Pyramids exhibition. It was 1:30 P.M. The rooms were full of school children and tourists murmuring to each other as they drifted along like tropical fish in a tank.

Mr. Moran circled the sculptures and decorative art from the tombs and temples of ancient Egypt, taking notes. Ms. Hall wandered along behind him, her mind elsewhere. She was stressed out about her pregraduation jury in six days at the Manhattan School of Music, where she was studying to be an opera singer.

Ms. Hall had rehearsed her material-Mozart, Camille Saint-Saëns and Hale Smith-for month. "Now I'm trying to deal with the situation, how I'm going to feel backstage," she said. It was at times like this, admitted Ms. Hall, that being Mr. Moran's girlfriend could be a little difficult. She could never quite get used to the way he say around, casually chatting with his friends, before turning in a burning performance.

Then there was Mr. Moran's advice when she was agonizing over a low grade or a substandard performance: Don't let it get to you , It was east for him to say. "You're not going to get it from him," Ms. Hall lamented. "But you want it so bad."

"On the other hand," she continued, "all my friends know Jason is the perfect boyfriend. He doesn't hold onto something and stick it in your face later. If he's a toilet, he's mostly flush. I'm a very sensitive person. I'm very hormonal. I get frumpy. Sometimes I just have to go out the door or I'll make everybody have a bad time. But Jason? Nothing bothers him. Jason doesn't resent anything!"

The couple stopped in front of a glass case containing a replica of the carrying chair of Queen Hetep-heres. Mr. Moran had been listening to all this with a slightly bemused look. Obviously, none of it was news to him. "I resent you for not carrying me around in that chair." He joked.

Ms. Hall departed for another rehearsal. The pianist said he was lucky to have a girlfriend who put up with his "mess".

December 8,1999

"I don't ever want to do 1-2-3-4-, I don't ever want to do that."

Jason Moran, the jazz pianist, was back at the upright piano in his bedroom, the one with the crocodile on top. He was rehearsing for the Dec. 11 tribute to Duke Ellington at Aaron Davis hall with his bassist Tarus Mateen and drummer Eric Harland, showing them how the group was going to segue from the jazz icon's brisk "Kinda Dukish" to his dirgier "Black and Tan Fantasty". Mr. Mateen and his bass were squeezed in between the pianist's queen size bed and dresser. Mr. Harland had set up a snare drum and a ride cymbal in a corner.

Mr. Moran had been nervous about his arrangements of five lesser-played Ellington tunes. But now that he and his two sidemen had played them, he was happy with the way they sounded. Me. Harland and Mr. Mateen picked them up quickly. Moreover, they seemed impressed with the young pianist's choice of tunes and his startling interpretations.

The 23-year old drummer, who was wearing a black Polo headband, followed Mr. Moran in and out of tempo, almost telepathically. That wasn't surprising, given that they had been playing together since they were students at the Houston High School of the performing and Visual Arts. Even in his tight quarters, Me. Mateen, who had a shaved head and a Pharaonic goatee, seemed to dance with his upright bass, leaning over and embracing the big fiddle when he reached for a particularly high not.

"Man, I ain't never heard none of these songs," Mr. Mateen said.

"Yeah," said Mr. Moran, excitedly," I tried to pick some ones that weren't the normal ones."

After an hour and a half, however, Mr. Moran stopped the rehearsal and sent his sidemen home. The pianists didn't want the band's performance to be too polished. " I like to have that really rough edged feel," he said.

December 9, 1999

"That reminded me of Taxi Driver, Scorcese's a master."

Jazz pianist Jason Moran and his girlfriend, Alicia hall, were strolling north on Eighth Avenue at about 6 P.M. after seeing Martin Scorses's Bringing Out the Dead at the Worldwide Cinema. Where movies are $4 all the time.

Mr. Moran enjoyed the director's ghoulishly funny New York story about an ambulance driver in the early 90's haunted by the ghosts of the down-and-out whose lives he couldn't save. "He had some great shots in there," he said.

Ms. Hall agreed "Yeah, I liked it, too."

It was dark, and Eighth Avenue looked like a scene from Bringing out the Dead, a blur of neon lights, blaring sirens, grotesque faces. Yet it was impossible not to step out on the sidewalk after the lights had come up in the Worldwide without thinking the city was no longer Me. Scorsese's blood-spattered Purgatory-on-the-Hudson.

"New York's not that bad anymore," Ms. Hall said. " Although I guess at any given place, at any give time, you can have an old guy bleeding from the head." The couple ate curried shrimp at Baluchi's on 56th Street. Afterward, the Blue Note recording artist tried to hail an oncoming cab that had its overhead light on.

The driver blew right by the couple, never imagining Mr. Moran was a critically acclaimed Blue Note recording artist and the son of a prominent Houston investment banker, or that Ms. Hall was the daughter of the treasurer of Texaco and an editor at John Wiley & Sons. All the cabby saw were their black faces.

"Well, some things in this city haven't changed." Mr. Moran said. "Sometimes these guys just drive by and give me the finger."