New York Times Jazz Review - September 4,1999
By: Ben Ratliff

Jason Moran's opening set on Wednesday night at the Jazz Standard, the beginning of his first week-long engagement in a New York jazz club, was a glimpse of a young musician who is using both material and method to see what he can get away with. How else would you explain a serious jazz musician whose set includes "Joga," bu the pop singer Bjork, as well as Carmine Coppola's theme for the assassination of Don Fanucci in "Godfather Part II"? At the same time, the group style of Mr. Moran's trio is all rhythmic volatility and interactive, spontaneously created form ­ the new sound, as far as nightclub jazz is concerned. Mr. Moran's sound is a little hesitant and grandiloquent, and his tunes are melancholy; he uses cluster chords, looking for opulent harmony and dissonance, and holds down the sustain pedal a good deal. One of his frequent gestures is a slow sweep up and down the piano's black keys. He's not out to slay anyone with solos; instead, he's working out different ways around the old structure of theme-solos-theme, and he seems particularly interested in making ideas collide. In "JAMO Meets SAMO," a fast piano melody full of jagged intervals and unresolved notes suddenly trickled out of the vamp he'd gotten the audience comfortable with, and the other members of the trio, the bassist Atsushi Osada and the drummer Eric Harland, slowly fell into line with it. At another point, bass and drums played a relaxed, chugging groove while Mr. Moran played strings of straight chords, sober and nonswinging. And throughout, Eric Harland changed his rhythm, creating tensions and altering the course of the music. It was a bit like watching a movie full of split-screen sequences: the band taught you to pay attention to two things at once. The "Godfather II" music was a kind of drum concerto for Mr. Harland. Mr. Moran repeated Coppola's short motif over and over for several minutes, giving it new harmonies each time; Mr. Harland, an agile and graceful drummer, gathered up his energy for a long solo, which he played mostly on the toms. It had a slow buildup, grew loud and towering and then slowly, elegantly, deflated.

THE NEW YORK TIMES 1999 Favorite Recordings
Ben Ratliff's Number One choice was

1. Jason Moran, "Soundtrack to Human Motion" (Blue Note/Capitol). This is round one of a jazz pianist's career that ought to be worth watching closely. With Greg Osby playing alto saxophone and producing, the album benefits from a tightly knit band and a tart but structuralist compositional sense.

NEW YORK TIMES Record review
By: Ben Ratliff

Jason Moran: Soundtrack to Human Motion

It's amazing to behold the idiosyncratic maturity of the 24-year-old pianist Jason Moran; he's such an obvious exception to the often-heard gripe that jazz hasn't produced individualists since the 60's. He's neither indebted to Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock nor Thelonious Monk, and a debut recording as fully formed as "Soundtrack to Human Motion" is rare. His music takes a little while to get used to. He uses the whole keyboard, tonality and dissonance, softness and loudness, and gravitates toward the cloudy chords of the French impressionist composers; at one point in the record he segues from Ravel's "Le Tombeau de Couperin" to one of his own themes, "States of Art".

In his language of dynamics, he follows an improvisation from deliberate, steely, equally spaced notes through to an episode of frenetic splashing and lets gravity pull him, like a slow cart suddenly tipped downhill. Mr. Moran can suggest romantic stillness, but he's always grounding that mood in Eric Harland's heavily accented, stronghitting and complicatedly broken-up drum patterns. He's otherwise accompanied on 'Soundtrack' by Greg Osby, Stefon Harris, and Lonnie Plaxico, all of whom he has played with in bands led by Mr. Osby and Mr. Harris. There's a sense that all the musicians on the record are working within the same new kind of music, a kind of both soulfully elegant and disquieting.

The Boston Globe - October 6,1999
By: Bob Blumenthal

HARRIS/MORAN/OSBY offer a trio of visions

Stefon Harris, Jason Moran, and Greg Osby all record for Blue Note, and the label put them together in a cooperative band that toured successfully in the spring. Their current visit to the Regattabar takes a different approach with each leader performing his own brief set over the common foundation of pianist Moran's trio. The schedule offered a clearer picture of the three players' respective conceptions, not to mention an uncommonly generous evening of music. Moran and his rhythm-sections partners had seeded Harris's music with swirling echoes and provocative displacements. In their set, these provocative notions were expanded into more dissonant and amorphous shapes. The pianist led the way with wide, staggered phrases in both hands and a sense of perpetual harmonic motion, and Mateen and Waits responded with tempos that surged and retreated in response. This trio has its own unique ideas of how to build, beginning with two originals before using soundtrack music from "The Godfather Part II" for a drum feature that segued into a bittersweet examination of a ballad by the pop singer Bjork. The music was restless and loose, yet cohesive; it left outlines if not rigid molds of form and tempo. Beyond the qualities of the individual sets, the evening argued that Moran is leading one of jazz's most complex and multifaceted trios.

Jazz Times - March 2000
By: Duck Baker

Moran has studied with Jaki Byard, Muhal Richard Abrams and Andrew Hill, whose influence is dominant, especially compositionally. This is all to the good. Few indeed have taken the road traveled by Hill, who himself has made precious few recordings. Moran has plenty of pianistic ideas, and repeated listens reveal how he is moving into his own way of dealing. Greg Osby played also on Hill's last great record, Eternal Spirit,so his ability to fit in here is no surprise. Stefon Harris' vibes are reminiscent of Bobby Hutcherson's playing with Hill, while Lonnie Plaxico and Eric Harland do nice rhythm work. This is good music that can only get better if Moran stays his course.

52nd Street.com
By: Jeff Morris

Introducing, with Soundtrack to Human Motion, unless you've been following Greg Osby's career of late, 24 year old piano prodigy Jason Moran. Moran joined alto saxophonist Osby at 22, has since appeared on Further Ado, Zero and Banned in New York, and stood out on all three. He lists Muhal Richard Abrams, Andrew Hill and the late Jaki Byard among his teachers, but the influences of Hill and Byard are most obvious--Moran has assimilated the density of the former's approach to the keyboard and the latter's classicism and sense of roots, which seems to inform "Kinesics" on this, his debut as a leader--little reminisces of cabarets, Ellingtonia and all.

Between the influences, Moran has cultivated an organic attack; it ebbs and flows, drummer Eric Harland bedamned, and the pianist's mature conception sustains Soundtrack to Human Motion. It's gratifying to hear one so young delving into thrashing M-Base grooves ("Gangsterism on Canvas") one minute and Ravel ("Le Tombeau de Couperin") the next. And though the personnel reads like a poll winners' one-off, it's a quartet-quintet through and through. These musicians know each others' M.O.s, which is saying something since Moran's originals aren't the stuff of blowing sessions. (It may also explain a certain sameness from track to track, the only spot at which Soundtrack buckles.) Osby, along with young star vibist Stefon Harris, guests here, lending his pungent alto to a labyrinthine "Snake Stance" and falling in with Moran on the latinish ellipses that dot "Still Moving." Still, the moments where the young leader can stretch out on his own--the solo Ravel, for example, or the charmingly-titled and surprisingly conventional ballad "Release from Suffering" in trio format--are the most rewarding. On "Release," Moran all but wrestles Lonnie Plaxico's bass right out of the mix with his heavy left hand. It points to a player who isn't quite ready to give up his vision--less simply the hallmark of the egotist than of one with admirable vision. And to think Jason Moran's vision is only just beginning to sharpen.