Cultural Diversity Roster

In 1999, the same year that Jason Moran released his debut recording Soundtrack To Human Motion, the prodigy pianist and composer also joined New Directions, a band made up of young stars from the Blue Note roster that went on tour in celebration of the label’s 60th anniversary. At the core of New Directions was the genesis of a rhythm section—with Moran, bassist Tarus Mateen, and drummer Nasheet Waits—that would go on to become one of the most enduringly creative piano trios in jazz.

Ten years later, the trailblazing trio—which Moran has since dubbed The Bandwagon—headed into Avatar Studios in Manhattan to record Ten, the most assured and focused album of Moran’s acclaimed career, a snapshot of a mature band with a decade of shared musical experience from which to draw.

“Ten is our first record that doesn’t rely on a concept to drive it. The only concept is us as a band today,” says Moran. “As we have evolved over ten years, there’s a certain ease that we now function within, an ease to let the music be. On some of my earlier recordings, I was making sure I exposed my ideas as a thinker. Now we refrain from jumping through every musical window of opportunity, but only jump through the good windows.”

The Bandwagon made their first recording as a trio with Facing Left in 2000, and has been the foundation of the majority of Moran’s artistic statements since. The trio has been augmented by saxophonist Sam Rivers for 2001’s Black Stars, (which was named to NPR’s list of “The Decade’s 50 Most Important Recordings”) and guitarist Marvin Sewell on 2005’s blues exploration Same Mother as well as 2006’s Artist In Residence, a compendium of Moran’s arts institution commissions that also featured collaborations with soprano Alicia Hall Moran and conceptual artist Adrian Piper.

Rolling Stone has called Moran “the most provocative thinker in current jazz,” and in Mateen and Waits, he has found his ideal companions, two distinctive voices on their instruments who are restlessly creative and share his open-mindedness and diversity of influences, not just beyond jazz in classical music and hip hop, but also beyond music in art, film, dance, and theater. Over ten years the trio has developed an intuitive level of musical communication. “When we get together and rehearse,” explains Moran, “there are few words directing how the music should go. We have to communicate as thinking people, not just want to feel the same things from our music over and over.”

In a recent live review in The New York Times, critic Nate Chinen praised Moran’s “fierce longstanding group,” adding that they “didn’t follow his lead so much as flank him on both sides. Though it’s a trio its sound described something bigger and more indivisible.”

“Gangsterism Over 10 Years” is probably the track on Ten that best indicates where The Bandwagon has been and where they are going. Here in its ninth incarnation, “Gangsterism” is an ongoing set of variations on a single theme Moran has been exploring in various settings since his debut.

Although the trio is undoubtedly the focus of Ten, Moran pulls material from several of his various recent projects. “Blue Blocks,” which opens the album with a bluesy cascade of chords, comes from Live: Time, a rhapsodic gospel suite inspired by the quilters of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, that was commissioned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and originally featured The Bandwagon with guitarist Bill Frisell. The elegiac “Feedback Pt. 2” was part of a piece commissioned by the Monterey Jazz Festival for which Moran drew inspiration from Jimi Hendrix’s performance at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. “Hendrix intentionally created guitar feedback and used the effect in a very musical way. So I extracted each feedback moment from that concert and then composed a sort of ballad over it and sampled Jimi. For us, performing the piece onstage was like having a séance with his spirit.”