# Why jazz pianist Jason Moran is dance’s most sought-after composer: Video, Photos

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2022/04/10/why-jazz-pianist-jason-moran-is-dances-most-sought-after-composer-video-photos/
- Published: 2022-04-10T16:20:27+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**Jason Moran calls himself a jazz pianist. He is one — and one of the best. He’s
an exciting and unpredictable improvisor. He has a remarkable harmonic imagination.
He can write a good tune. He possesses an advanced inner rhythm machine. He’s equally
fluent in tradition and progress. He’s as fluid and versatile a musician as they
come, able to encompasses all the arts.**

But the first thing you notice about Moran is the sound he gets out of the piano,
which is neither well-described as fluid nor versatile. It seems to come from a 
source too deep for that. The resonances overpower the senses. A single struck note
not only sounds grounded but also _feels_ grounded, as though it were coming from
under your feet and then filling the space with a sonic aura. When his wrists travel
up and down the keyboard in roaring glissandos, the reverberation becomes the soul-
filling and soul-thrilling sound of tectonic plates colliding. If your knees are
like mine, they shake.

Lately, Moran’s reverberations have been traveling far and wide, filling grand physical
spaces while also creating theatrical spaces in opera and dance. In January, he 
[filmed](https://www.elbphilharmonie.de/en/mediatheque/elbphilharmonie-sessions-jason-moran/668)
three solo piano pieces in the grand foyer of the world’s most monumental modern
concert hall, the [Elbphilharmonie](https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-ca-cm-elbphilharmonie-hamburg-notebook-20170303-story.html)
in Hamburg, for the venue’s a grand space overlooking a grand expanse. Moran’s playing
is surprisingly intimate, yet even on video, he evokes the sense of a soaring space.

![Leslie Andrea Williams with the Martha Graham Dance Company performs.](https://
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![Jazz pianist, composer, Jason Moran performs.](https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.
com/dims4/default/dc88507/2147483647/strip/true/crop/5913x3969+0+0/resize/840x564!/
quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcalifornia-times-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Ff7%
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Monumentalism has been clearly on his mind. On March 5, the Washington National 
Opera gave the premiere of “Written in Stone,” a project of four one-act operas 
by different composers and librettists, that consider the fraught connotations of
our capital’s national monuments. The sequence begins with Moran’s [“Chantal,”](https://www.kennedy-center.org/wno/home/2021-2022/written-in-stone/)
which is described as an introduction to the complicated cultural significance of
monumentalism.

That same day, one of America’s leading choreographers, Ronald K. Brown, brought
his company, Evidence, to Royce Hall for a “first glimpse” of “The Equality of Night
and Day,” a work-in-progress commissioned by UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance
and for which Moran wrote the piano score. That was followed by two back-to-back
world premieres of major dance pieces with new music by Moran. First there was Alonzo
King’s “Single Eye” as part of American Ballet Theatre’s four-day residency last
week at Segerstrom Hall in Costa Mesa; it ended Saturday. On Saturday at the Soraya,
the Martha Graham Dance Company reimagined a lost work by the iconic choreographer,“
Canticle for Innocent Comedians,” with Moran playing a new score onstage to accompany
the dance.

Each of these three dance works matters. Dealing with social and environmental and
political concerns at an exalted level, they matter in our moment of history. They
also matter because Moran creates the acoustic space where they can matter. When
you look, you must listen, and not all modern dance knows that.

From the second you hear Moran touch a key on his piano — even when it’s only on
recording, as was the case with the first two dances — you are invited to open your
ears. The sound of his piano becomes a physical presence that in a mysterious but
real way connects you with the space you are in, as well as with those onstage.

The effect is to raise awareness to the level that John Cage did with Merce Cunningham,
where music and dance do not need to operate hand-in-hand. They remain individual
yet also part of the larger experience, which is how we take in the world. There
are times when Moran can soothe with a gentle melody; when he can awaken with somber,
blues-induced deep reflection; when he can make into ferociously repeating arpeggios
that ring like gongs summoning you to attention. The dance, for its part, can be
intense, violent, loving, lyrical or decorative. But domination of one medium over
another is out of the picture. The sense of space created by Moran’s sound liberates
the mind, making it susceptible to independent observation.

![The Martha Graham Dance Company performs during "The Canticle for Innocent Comedians."](
https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/615b13e/2147483647/strip/true/crop/
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This is an extraordinary feat in Brown’s “The Equality of Night and Day.” The score
features recordings of activist and scholar Angela Davis speaking of “humans all
over the world fighting for our humanity,” as she examines the nuclear family, the
unequal treatment of Black men in our prisons and other wrongs she has spent her
life attempting to correct. Moran’s reflective response matches her tone, assertive
and sensible.

Brown’s dancers, in blue robes, undertake an exercise in sustained beauty that is
communal rather than individual, elegant in movement. For a half hour, it becomes
possible to believe in the logical inevitability of betterment, which has become
the rarest quality of modern discourse.

While ABT offers no background to King’s “Single Eye,” the choreographer prefaces
it with a quote from Matthew 6:22: “If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall
be full of light.” That single eye, though, needs a single ear to take in a vast
soundscape, to say nothing of a large contingent of dancers. For King, who is one
of the arts’ most [eloquent and determined advocates](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oX1Jl9-tnIs)
for the environment, the body and nature are one.

Nature, however, is not able to be boiled down. In his seven dances, consisting 
of virtuoso ensemble numbers, solos and pas de deux, athletic dancers in earth colors
are the expression of survival, with community meaning everything. Added to Moran’s
solos are sound recordings by Bernie Krause, taken from nature, broadening the vista
and reminding us that the fight for humanity entails humans accepting that we are
not alone on this planet.

Graham’s “Canticle for Innocent Comedians” was also a timely hymn to nature in several
parts: Sun, Earth, Wind, Water, Fire, Moon, Stars and Death/Rebirth. But not enough
of the 1952 dance survives to reconstruct, so the Graham company did the next best
thing and created a new dance with the parts assigned to a host of choreographers.“
Moon” retains the original Graham dance, while choreographers Sonya Tayeh, Kristina
and Sadé Alleyne, Sir Robert Cohan, Juliano Nuñes, Yin Yue, Micaela Taylor and Jenn
Freeman take on the rest.

![The Martha Graham Dance Company performs during "The Canticle for Innocent Comedians."](
https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/5007a6b/2147483647/strip/true/crop/
5395x3900+0+0/resize/840x607!/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcalifornia-times-brightspot.
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![Moran walks on stage for a curtain call.](https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/
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90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcalifornia-times-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F43%2F31%2Fb371eee847728dc3861ecdf1d843%
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Remarkably, the sections flowed smoothly, the differences in movement seeming less
extreme than they were, due in great part to Moran’s musical narrative. His range
was wide, where repeated single notes could morph into bell-like broken chords that
turn into the sound of broken glass. Bass notes beat as if drums. Those big glissandi
required white gloves to protect the pianist’s hands. In all, this extraordinary
journey in sound produced the sense of whole. The music, coupled with the varied
choreography, suggested that multitudes of movement are what must be preserved if
we are to preserve our environment.

Moran’s epic score does just that here, absorbing a multitude of musics, from spiritual
to lullaby, from influences that can include Monk, Ravel and Stockhausen (those 
earthquakes of glissandos). It all becomes one. Dancers as individuals, in the end,
line up together like a single organism that then breaks apart.

The specific task for Moran in “Comedians” was to connect not just the individual
dances but also the past of a 96-year-old dance company (America’s oldest) with 
its future. On Saturday, that proved shocking. Seven decades after Graham devised
the theme of her original dance, we stand in desperate need of a canticle for an
innocent comedian, now that one such comedian has become the heroic leader of besieged
Ukraine. Now too we are faced with a climate-change capacity for wind, water and
fire to be our undoing.

In “Canticle for Innocent Comedians,” “The Equality of Night and Day” and “Single
Eye,” Moran has found the sound to make the existential connection with past and
future. It would take some doing to put these three essential dances, made for three
different companies, on the same program. But that is where they belong, because
they make us see and hear where we belong.

![Dancers performing onstage.](https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/
7c1fa86/2147483647/strip/true/crop/5085x3390+0+64/resize/2400x1600!/quality/90/?
url=https%3A%2F%2Fcalifornia-times-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F60%2Ffa%2F3c65dd514f4786ef9d3401e08ade%
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