Commencement Jason Moran

TRANSCRIPT

Darryl Harper:
Welcome everyone. My name is Darryl Harper. I'm the John William Ward professor of music and chair of the music department. And it's my honor today to introduce Jason Moran, composer, pianist and multimedia artist, artistic director for Jazz at the Kennedy Center, and a faculty member at the New England Conservatory. He has been called the most provocative thinker in current jazz and a caretaker of jazz's legacy. Revered for his groundbreaking contributions to the genre, he's also celebrated for innovative and diverse artistic disciplines and traditions.

His searching engagement with the history of Black music and its cultural and experiential contexts, challenges and enriches our understanding. Mr. Moran's extraordinary creative production has generated accolades including a MacArthur Fellowship and a Doris Duke Artist Award. And his activity stretches beyond his many recordings and performances to partnerships with such venerated and iconic visual artists as Joan Jonas, Carol Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, Julie Mehretu and Theaster Gates, dancer and choreographer, Alonzo King and the Lyons Ballet Theater.

And with filmmaker Ava DuVernay, scoring the film Selma and 13th. A generous teacher and mentor, Mr. Moran regularly conducts workshops, master classes and outreach programs to inspire new generations of artists. And we are deeply grateful that he was able to join us last year as a Presidential Scholar here at Amherst College for a talk entitled Look Down, Now Look Up: Music as a Map. Please join me in welcoming Jason Moran.

Jason Moran:
Thank you Dr. Harper, and thank you to everyone here at Amherst for being such gracious hosts and engaging with what we think sound is capable of. Part of my understanding of the piano and sound in general was not born out of being a Suzuki student. It was born out of leaving the conservatory. For all of the information that a piano student is given from their teacher, they really know nothing about what the power of music is at that moment. They only learn that later. And the way I would like to start to talk about the way I look down and the way that I look up is to think about and honor the people who really paved the path.

And I often say I don't stand on the shoulders of, I stand shoulder to shoulder with these people. My mother who came to every piano lesson and wrote notes incessantly during every piano lesson, so much so that I would... Well, I only got one time to tell my mother to stop taking notes during my lesson because my ears were so tuned that I could hear the pencil crawl across the page and that was distracting. And I was already having a bad lesson. So I think about my mother in these lessons.

I think about her sitting by my side at home watching every lesson I try to accomplish, every song I try to learn, every technique I try to master in my hand. But I also know that in my house when I look down and I think about where I'm from, Houston, Texas, the part that really makes me understand where I'm from is how I talk. It's the slang that never leaves. It's the ridicule I get from my family when I say 10. And that's a number. But then how does that resonate and find itself into the piano? And the first person that I fell in love with at the piano was a man named Thelonious Monk.

And Thelonious Monk kept his slang, his Southern North Carolina slang that his mother and father and his sister gave him. He kept it and he found a place to place it onto the piano that sounded very distinct and unlike any Suzuki piano song I was learning at the time. And if I may just demonstrate the two, one is very rudimentary, one is called Cradle Song. It's a very simple song I learned in the Suzuki book. And then I'll play Thelonious Monk right after that just to hear how much the slang is different, how much the meaning is different and what they offer me.

Thank you. Two different composers, two different centuries, two different histories, two different languages, two different ways of expressing themselves. Both equal to me, both teach me about technique, both teach me about phrasing, both teach me about dynamics, both teach me how to look down. And one of the things Thelonious Monk was able to do so well is that every once in a while during a concert, he would stand up from the piano. And when he'd stand up from the piano, that meant the music sounded good.

And when it made him sound good, he would dance and he would dance and swirl all around the band. And in this research that I was doing about Thelonious Monk, there's one short moment and it's very long rehearsal when Thelonious Monk starts to tap dance. Only for about three seconds does this moment happen, but for me, this is the best moment to think about the way Thelonious Monk looks down. So this is Thelonious Monk on a loop tap dancing.

That's how I get out of Houston. I follow Thelonious Monk's footsteps. I hear that he has been in New York City, a child of the Great Migration. His mother brings him up to New York, and that's where he changes the future of music. And I figure being in Houston, Texas is lovely as it is and as lovely as all of my family is, I will have to get out of here. I'll have to leave and follow. And the pianist who was teaching at Manhattan School of Music, that it was a beacon for me to think about the way this history changes. The possibility of this instrument was a pianist named Jaki Byard.
And Jaki Byard is an incredible pianist from Worcester, Massachusetts, most notably known for playing with Charles Mingus and all of Charles Mingus's great groups with Eric Dolphy and with another musician, Sam Rivers. So Jaki Byard was this historian of the instrument, and Jaki was thinking about the ways that history does not end with the book that you've opened to learn about the repertoire of the piano. That you could then generate something that would almost combine histories. That you wouldn't necessarily only look down in the place where you were, but you try to see where someone else was and you would try to unify those spaces.

And that with two hands, for the pianist, the two hands could combine the worlds, but you would have to make the brain much more malleable to figure this out. One of the things that Jaki Byard really talks about is not thinking that history was a thing that you shouldn't touch, that you shouldn't fold onto itself. It was more than a piece of music, but it was more like clay. You take a song and you manipulate it in a way. And you might make people angry if you did it the right way, because they may say, "Don't touch that song that way. Don't play Bach like that.

Don't play Brahms like that or Ravel," or "Don't play Thelonious Monk like that, or John Coltrane." But Jaki had a way of saying, "Nah, if you research it well enough, you'll find a new path in it that'll make most of the heroes that you have, they'll be happy with how you touch the instrument." And one of the things Jaki talks about was the ability to change the technique of the instrument. And I'd say he would do things at the piano that I thought he must have 15 hands because he made the piano roar in a way that I would not have known had I just been studying those great Suzuki books.

So I'd like to play a piece that is inspired by Jaki Byard and it requires removing a little bit more.

So every Monday was a challenge to sit at two pianos with a musician who I loved so much and was so intimidated by also, but it was like being with my grandfather. And I felt like the prep that I needed as a kid growing up in Houston was how do you relate intergenerationally? How do you relate to musicians who have basically created the language that you're inheriting, but you're inheriting it more out of you just showed up. You didn't necessarily earn it. You get to learn from it, but you didn't earn it.
You didn't suffer the consequences. Jaki Byard was sent to World War II. Being on a boat, playing this music on a boat. He really suffers to make this music, but he also finds so much joy that he wants to then inspire another generation, which I think is why students show up here to learn music. Why they come to this campus in this setting and not New York City, but why they up here to have the space to think about the sound that they want to make. I needed something much more full of hard winters, a nearby Harlem, a nearby Barnard, a nearby space to also have friends to go see the world with.

And maybe that's part of the next thing that I want to discuss is, part of what I tried to understand about what it means to look down at the floor, to where your feet stand and then to look up to where maybe you'll eventually end up is all of this movement that it takes to get to those two spaces. And once I graduated and years later I heard the artist Adrian Piper talk about the process that a musician must go through. I say a musician, but she really aims it at all artists.

Adrian Piper:
Artists ought to be writing about what they do and what kinds of procedures they go through to realize the work, what their presuppositions in making the work are and related things. If artists' intentions and ideas were more accessible to the general public, I think it might break down some of the barriers of misunderstanding between the art world and artists and the general public. I think it would become clear to the extent to which artists are just as much a product of their society as anyone else without any other kinds of vocation.

Artists ought to be writing about what they do and what kinds of procedures they go through to realize the work, what their presuppositions in making the work are and related things. If artists' intentions and ideas were more accessible to the general public, I think it might break down some of the barriers of misunderstanding between the art world and artists and the general public. I think it would become clear the extent to which artists are just as much a product of their society as anyone else without any other kinds of vocation.

Jason Moran:
Another pianist who this year would've been 125 years old, is Duke Ellington. And part of what we love about, or what I love about Duke Ellington is he really understands where he is in the world. He has mapped the world through many of the compositions that he's written. He tells you about the places he's been and the band has been in hopes maybe that you will get there. And if you never do, you get to have the sound that he made inspired by the spaces he was in. I remember being in high school and hearing the song A Night in Tunisia that Dizzy Gillespie wrote wondering, what is a Tunisia?

What is it? He would hear these songs... Roy Eldridge would write a song called Wabash Stomp, what does Wabash mean to Chicago? Wabash Avenue. What does it mean to name these places in the song? To give you a sense of... For me, I understood to give you a sense of safety about places you could go, and it might sound like this. These were important to me. But one thing that Ellington figures out is not simply the places where he was, it was also the emotional map that he also tried to give his audience.
So he did not mind tapping into his inner feelings and how complex and complicated it was, the things that he would try to sort out. So one of these pieces that he wrote, this one is called Melancholia.

So Ellington understands that you're only as good as to know where you are if you know who you are on the inside. And to maybe often ask that question about where you are and how you feel in those moments. It's hard to, as a performer, because I think you jump on stage and you almost want to find sometimes a way to get away from who you are. As real and as strange as it sounds, sometimes the performance itself allows you to become someone else. Sometimes that can be truth. Sometimes that can also be lies.
But I think Ellington wants to make a catalog of music so dense and thick that it allows you many opportunities to become different people. Thank goodness for him, for doing this. This is a challenging work. But then I started to understand that maybe one of the things that I could try to do, and fortunately with technology, it made it a lot easier, was that as I started to travel the world, that I would often have my recording devices with me. I would often just tape the things that I heard around the world. I was in New Orleans last year and I heard the most incredible sound walking Bourbon Street at midnight.

It wasn't the sound of one band, it was the sound of 300 bands playing at once, with 3000 people yelling around it. That itself was a true gumbo of sound, was the truest gumbo I've ever heard in my life, was the sound of that street at night. Because that street had represented and continues to represent the place where a lot of music arrives. Not all agreeing with one another, but living on the street, living in the sound of the people dancing to it, understanding what it means to them.

And then one of the things I started to do is as I started to travel to places like an Istanbul, like some place that Ellington might talk about. What is Istanbul? That one day after a long day of being toured around the city, I asked the person who was touring me around to talk about the day to me, to hear it in Turkish, this language, which I was not aware of living in New York, but Turkish sounds like this.

Speaker 4:
[foreign language 00:28:32] My phone. [foreign language 00:28:34] I will call you. [foreign language 00:30:12]

Jason Moran:
About 15 seconds into this recording, she receives a telephone call from her mother. So what you're hearing is half of the conversation with her mother and what I'm hearing, what she says. And part of what it started to make me... The inspiration for this lives in a great composer from Brazil named Hermeto Pascoal. I must say his name because he was the first composer I heard really attach the keyboards that he was playing to the world around him.

He would figure out ways to transcribe the pigs in the jungle, the school teacher in the fourth grade classroom, the football game being announced by the announcer. He had found a way to score everything around him. And when I heard this, I thought, "Oh, that's challenging for the technique." In this way that Jaki Byard talks about, the technique mustn't stay still. That part of learning how to play speech would be very different than transcribing the way Thelonious Monk played the piano.

It would be something else that I'll have to figure out in the articulation of a word in a punctuation or a phrasing that then could hopefully make sense. So learning then decide to say, "Well, for the places that I would travel, that may be in the same way that Ellington told us about a city or Billy Strayhorn tells us about a city like Isfahan that I could say something about a city like Istanbul." And then when I say look down or look up, I also know that part of looking in is really important and who you are with to look in with.

Many people fall in love many kinds of ways. I fell in love with a woman named Alicia Hall Moran, who is here and is my partner for life. And a fellow composer, a fellow vocalist, and we fell in love at Manhattan School of Music. She had arrived from Barnard and she had come into the school of Manhattan School of Music with a very different sense of what was possible for music than maybe a lot of my other friends had.

But through the rest of our lives together, which is now getting close to 30 years, part of what we... The best part about looking down or looking up was having someone to share that with so that you weren't necessarily just harboring all of this unfiltered information that someone could parse this information out. But how do I then paint a portrait of a person like Alicia? And so now I'll play the song I simply called Alicia.

Thank you. Thank you. It's very real. I think when I was in school, no one told us about the reality of music. They teach you... This is what your teacher ask you to learn. This is the repertoire you have to play. You got to play Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, right? You got to do those. And then when you get out into the world, you realize that it has a very different function for the audience you serve. That the music is actually a service industry. It's often talked about as a arts industry, but it's a service industry.

It is a trade you would learn at a trade school. This is trade. This is something you trade with people for energy. I'm thinking about it this way right now because one of my sons goes to Aviation High School in Queens. He takes apart engines and wings and welds them back together. And he's in what you call a trade school. But why would we not say that the arts are also a trade? And he has totally made me rethink the way the piano works for people and the way songs can work for people. And not necessarily that when the artist shows up that you come to see them, you really come to see yourself.

You bring your history to the listening session. You share what you think you hear. You hear what I play, but I have no idea how you process the information. That is on you, that is a reflection of you, I'm just serving. And that there's a shift that I've had over the past, maybe a decade, of thinking about what is the role of the artist or what is the role of the trades, the crafts person who shares the craft and is asked to share the craft over and over again.

And then I think about how to look up, and there was a song that Alicia and I worked on with thinking about a commission we had for the Philadelphia Museum of Art about the Gee's Bend Quilters from Gee's Bend Alabama. These incredible quilters and quilting community for generations. Now they're making these incredible geometric quilts. And we went down there with... I brought my aunt who makes towels and blankets for all of my cousins and all of our children. She's done this for generations. I brought my aunt with me.

I brought one of Alicia's best friends, [inaudible 00:39:53] Solomon, a writer from Philadelphia who Alicia went to Barnard with. And we brought the twins, our twins, who were then... They were six months old. We went down to Alabama and it was incredible. And we started to hear about these songs that the quilters would sing as they quilted. And one of them is, "You ain't got but one life to live. You better take your time." And it says it over and over again. "You ain't got but one life to live. You better take your time." There was something about the way this woman, Seabelle Kennedy is her name.

The way she's saying that, it made me think about three of the words in that sentence, life, live, time, life, live time, life, live, time. So as the last piece I'd like to play about looking up to our ancestors, this is Life, Live, Time.

Speaker 6:
(singing)

Jason Moran:
Thank you.

Darryl Harper:
Sure. Does anyone have any questions?

Speaker 5:
I don't have a question. I just want to tell you, that was an amazing way to have an amazing day. Thank you so much.

Jason Moran:
Thank you.

Speaker 7:
I got a question for that last piece. How do you filter that? How do you process it? How do you process her words? You know what I mean?

Jason Moran:
If I was able to say it, I wouldn't be able to play it. This is a Thelonious Monk saying. But also something that's... I don't know what you all feel, but I know what I feel when I hear her. It's a lot. And I also think in playing music, you tap into a lot you don't understand. And part of the rationale for wanting to make music is that you can tap into unknown parts. That as for as much as I love a book, the records are my books. The sounds that the bands made are the books. So they teach you a kind of code that you can tap into for an audience.

She unlocks a code in the way she sings, and that's me pulling parts of her phrase apart. So I also know I'm restructuring her, but it's also a song like that, which maybe none of us have heard before. But how does it then make a room change its attitude? And I've been in many rooms, and I've played in many rooms where audiences have come up and said, I've had the worst day until I sat through your concert." And I don't know if that's a good thing or bad thing sometimes. But I also know that a musician like the great Richard Davis, a great bass player.

And Richard Davis talked about bringing people who were troubled to see John Coltrane play at the Village Vanguard. He could bring them there so that the music could help save them where they were battling drugs, addiction, gambling. He would bring them down into the basement on 7th Avenue in New York to hear that music. And so for a song like that, I know that there is something that she plants in her sound, and maybe she didn't know it then, but also feel that part of the reason I play music is to bring those people with me.

So it's not simply to show up here and play the piano. I have to bring my folks with me too. And so if I have a catalog of music that allows that to happen, then it may be more powerful than other people can be in the room who you don't see.

Speaker 8:
I just want to share. I think it's so meaningful, at least for me, and I'm sure for many others who have spent a lot of years in this room. This is the room where choral music is rehearsed at Amherst. I was in the Glee Club for four years and did four years of rehearsing in this room. And we always learned during those rehearsals that music is the universal language. And we sang not only music, Western European tradition, but also folk songs from around the world, Negro spirituals.

And we toured all over the world with the idea that we would reach people through music. And I just want to share that you've taken that to a whole other level that I'd never experienced before, but it relates directly to that theme that has lived in this room for so many years. So thank you for that.

Speaker 9:
I have a follow-up question to what was asked regarding tapping into those codes. How do those folks that you are connecting with receive the new messages? So the Istanbul girl that's on the phone with her mother or the women who are doing this work, how is this received and how can you then continue the conversation through that dialogue of the arts?

Jason Moran:
One is, I don't know that answer, but part of... When I say that the music is a trade, it's also I'm trading it with you. That it's a card that you can trade with someone else. So even if you walk out of here and never talk about this concert for 10 years, that if it then resurfaces, maybe you're in Alabama, say, "Oh, wait a minute, I should go down to Gee's Bend." I remember hearing this song, which everybody should go down to Gee's Bend. It's incredible to be in rural Alabama. A Black rural Alabama. It's really gorgeous. And to see these quilts in this landscape too.

Part of why I sit on this side often meeting at the piano is so that I don't know what happens with it. I try to share it as often as I can, whether it's with students, which for me is the big thing to do, because I was taught by great masters. Great masters from Randy Weston to Muhal Richard Abrams, to Andrew Hill, to Sam Rivers, to Archie Shepp, to Charles Lloyd, to Cassandra Wilson, to Jerry Allen. Great, great masters have taught me. And part of what I only know how to do is to then turn around. My mother and many of her sisters are also educated.

So it's not a thing that you then just take it, it's that you must then give it back to someone else. But I don't know how they will use it. And that for me is the great joy. Jaki Byard showed me how to do this. He showed me that. He did not say... He did not say do that. And he definitely... I would do that generally for 10 minutes during a concert. He definitely didn't say do that. But the thing is that he's like, "Nah, here's a technique that you'll see as a flourish." And I said, "Well, what if we make the garnish the main dish and let's just turn that."

And for me, that's the teachers that I come from. They touched very sensitive material frequently so that they were almost immune to the reactions that they might feel. And I think in touching the sensitive material in music, not all music has that potency, but some does. That if you touch it just with enough awareness, then you might trigger reactions in people in a room. But then it's up to them. I have no idea. But it's also... Like I said before, it's why I sit on this side frequently because then I get to give it away. And I love sitting in the audience as well to receive someone else's wisdom.

Speaker 9:
Thank you. I receive it.

Jason Moran:
Thank you. Yes.

Speaker 10:
Thank you. I heard once that prayer is talking to God, meditation is listening, and piano allows you to do both simultaneously. What are your thoughts? It sounds so much better coming from you?

Jason Moran:
I mean, vibration is a real thing. The way vibrations... And it's not simply from the piano, but it's from drums, it's from basses, it's from voices. Vibrations change people. There are these great videos you can watch online about how a frequency makes water change its shape. And with that in mind, when Duke Ellington plants that song, he plants it in the key of D flat. That key unlocks something. It's not this one.

He frequently plants his most emotional material in the key of D flat because he knows the power. Maybe partially of what you just spoke of, but also that part that's innate, that lives in how frequencies allow people to breathe or to play the key of D flat on the piano you must open your hand up. And so you have to be aware to play it effectively. Can you say that phrase again so that I can record it right quick? Hold on.

Speaker 10:
Prayer is speaking to God. Meditation is listening. Playing the piano allows you to do both simultaneously. Thank you.

Jason Moran:
Thank you.
If you become a song, you'll know where it started. Well, thank you. It's been a pleasure to share with you this afternoon. Thank you Dr. Hopkins.