Make It New

Front matter

RESHAPING JAZZ IN ERE ZIST CENTURY

BILL BEUTTLER

E j k = y 4 ; SN a S ILL p ALR

Contents

Member Institution Acknowledgments

I. Jason Moran

2. Vijay lyer

Chapter One

Il saw a lot of great music researching this book in 2016. Jason Moran recording a solo piano album at New York’s Park Avenue Armory. Vijay lyer and Wadada Leo Smith performing music from their duo album of that year, A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke, at New York’s Met Breuer Museum and again at Harvard. Anat Cohen unveiling her new Tentet at the Jazz Standard, where George Wein was also in the audience, and at Wein’s Newport Jazz Festival. The Bad Plus and friends doing their version of Ornette Coleman’s Science Fiction at Newport. An evening of the Bad Plus at the Blue Note followed by Julian Lage and Gyan Riley performing John Zorn bagatelles at the Village Vanguard. Moran and Robert Glasper as a piano duo, playing and telling funny stories at the Blue Note. Esperanza Spalding and company performing her Emily’s D+Evolution at Boston’s Shubert Theatre. Rudresh Mahanthappa leading a quartet through his Bird Calls tribute to Charlie Parker at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art. Lage, Scott Colley, and Clarence Penn joining Miguel Zenon in Puerto Rico for a “Caravana Cultural” presentation of the music of Sonny Rollins.

I saw all that and more, and ranking them is something I'd generally avoid. But if forced to choose, my favorite jazz performance of that year was an afternoon trio set at the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival in New York’s Tompkins Square Park. Jason Moran played acoustic grand piano and Fender Rhodes electric alongside two bona fide jazz masters, bassist Dave Holland (whose induction as a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master came the following April) and drummer Jack DeJohnette (who received the same honor in 2012). In keeping pace with these two great innovators, Moran erased any doubt that he is an artist worthy of their company—one, like others of his generation, as intent on expanding and updating jazz as Holland, DeJohnette, and their peers had been in the 1970s.

The park was already crowded when the trio came onstage on this pleasantly sunny August day. Three earlier groups had already performed, most notably the Donny McCaslin Quartet, whose profile had been boosted by backing David Bowie on his final album, released earlier that year. They came out dressed casually, Moran wearing a billed cap, gray shorts, and white sneakers, and started off abstractly, edging their way into Holland’s “Four Winds,” from his essential freejazz album of 1973, Conference of the Birds.

Freedom rang throughout the set. If Moran was at all intimidated in such company, it didn’t show. If anything, he appeared comfortably in charge. He smiled in admiration at what DeJohnette was doing on cymbals as they accompanied Holland’s solo on the opener, and Holland in turn grinned at Moran and at what he was contributing harmonically.

Moran had played with each of them before: with DeJohnette on the Don Byron album Ivey-Divey (2004) and on the Rudresh Mahanthappa/Bunky Green collaboration Apex (2010); with Holland touring in the short-lived Overtone Quartet and, earlier, subbing for vibraphonist Steve Nelson on a Holland quintet tour. Holland and DeJohnette had worked together, too, most famously on the landmark Miles Davis fusion album Bitches Brew, whose 1970 release date preceded Moran’s birth by five years. This was the first time the three of them had played together as a trio, though, and Moran clearly relished the opportunity.

“This is a dream come true to play with Jack DeJohnette and Dave Holland,” he declared when they paused after the first tune for him to address the audience. “Let me just say that first off. We want to play a piece of music for Bobby Hutcherson, one of the greatest musicians ever in the world. Were gonna play a piece of his called ‘Montara. ”

Hutcherson had died two weeks earlier, and the audience-friendly funk groove of his mid-1970s classic, accentuated by Moran’s Rhodes, had an elegiac tinge to it as well as free-leaning improvisation from the trio. Then the freedom was ratcheted up fully for the set’s highlight: a stretched-out medley of Juan Tizol’s “Caravan,” Duke Ellington’s “Fleurette Africaine,” and McCoy Tyner’s “Inner Glimpse.” Moran conjured both Tyner and Cecil Taylor as the trio roared through the latter, which culminated in a ferocious drum solo that left DeJohnette looking wrung out as they took their bows.

“Caravan” and “Fleurette Africaine” had an obvious link to a previous intergenerational trio, when Ellington had been teamed with Charles Mingus and Max Roach on the 1963 classic Money Jungle. But what Moran and company did with “Caravan” in particular and throughout their set put me more in mind of a double album recorded live in Paris in February 1971 by Circle, a quartet Holland and Chick Corea had assembled upon leaving Miles Davis’s fusion band to explore the avant-garde. Joining them were Barry Altschul and Anthony Braxton, the latter having recently begun releasing influential albums of his own (both men would also join Holland on Conference of the Birds). 1 still own the copy of Paris-Concert | bought while in high school, and retain fond memories of first encountering how Circle took Wayne Shorter’s “Nefertiti” uptempo and launched it into the stratosphere. What I saw in Tompkins Square Park that afternoon had a touch of déjà vu to it. These were artists whose devotion to jazz history compelled them to honor it by taking even classic works to radically new places.

1 spotted two other such artists chatting together backstage as the set ended. One was Vijay lyer, Moran’s friendly rival in piling up various accolades from the jazz world and beyond, and, like Moran, someone whose work is inspired by visionary musicians with links to the M-Base Collective and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). | had seen lyer perform those memorable sets with AACM icon Wadada Leo Smith twice that spring. Chatting with lyer was Henry Threadgill, an early AACM member who had won the Pulitzer Prize for Music that April. Moran has called Threadgill his favorite composer, and performed with him on Threadgill’s album Old Locks and Irregular Verbs, released the same month as Threadgill’s Pulitzer honor.

Other acclaimed musicians of the Moran-lyer generation and younger have similar ties to M-Base and/or the AACM. One of them, Matana Roberts, is related to Moran (l saw him back her one night during her January 2016 residency at The Stone). An album of hers, The Chicago Project (2008), was produced by lyer. Others are AACM members (Nicole Mitchell, Tomeka Reid) or have earned academic degrees studying under AACM legends Braxton (Mary Halvorson, Tyshawn Sorey, Steve Lehman) and/or George Lewis (Sorey, Lehman, Courtney Bryan). But none of them has yet captured as much attention from the jazz press as Moran and lyer have.

Moran that afternoon was in the midst of an especially productive period. A few weeks earlier I'd seen him perform at the Newport Jazz Festival as part of the Charles Lloyd New Quartet. In March had come his adventurous live solo piano recording at Park Avenue Armory (I'd spotted Threadgill in the audience there, too, seated near pianist Ethan Iverson of the Bad Plus), which he put out three months later as his first self-released recording since leaving Blue Note Records. Four days before The Armory Concert dropped, he joined fellow Houston native

Robert Glasper for a lively duo piano set at New York’s Blue Note Jazz Club. His annual Thanksgiving run at the Village Vanguard a few months later with his longtime Bandwagon trio mates Tarus Mateen and Nasheet Waits also led to a live album, Thanksgiving at the Vanguard, released in April 2017. An October 2016 studio session with guitarist Halvorson and cornetist Ron Miles yielded BANGS, a collection of forward-looking chamber music, spacious and lyrical, to which all three musicians contributed compositions and which Moran put out via Bandcamp in May 2017.

Moran’s duties as artistic director for jazz at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, led to a new project of his own, “Muldrow Meets Mingus,” for which he recruited the visionary singer/rapper/producer Georgia Anne Muldrow to help him reimagine “Fables of Faubus,” “Goodbye Porkpie Hat,” and other Charles Mingus classics, which they premiered in January 2017.

Moran had told me about that Mingus project over dinner one night in Boston shortly after the Armory concert. His wife, the vocalist Alicia Hall Moran, had been at the Armory concert, too, where she suggested that the best way to get him to find time for an interview would be to share a meal with him. “He likes to eat,” she noted, smiling. So he and 1 did so on his next trip to teach at New England Conservatory. The Mingus project came up when we found ourselves discussing the pros and cons of social media.

A mention of a recent GQ piece about Kamasi Washington, whose three-CD debut album, The Epic, had captured the music world’s attention the year before, prompted me to bring up a rival saxophonist who had recently disparaged Washington’s musicianship.

“Oh, tons of musicians do,” Moran responded. “It’s amazing. Like, cmon. 1 know people you should be mad at. Believe me, this ain’t the cat.”

l asked if he’d gotten wind of a Facebook kerfuffle a few years earlier in which guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel was dismissive of the high praise accorded Vijay lyer, who had recently been awarded a MacArthur Foundation genius grant.

“Oh my God, that was a big one,” replied Moran, who had received his own MacArthur in 2010. “Vijay and 1 went to breakfast not long after that. When I’m in New York, 1 would take people to breakfast at Sylvia’s up in Harlem. 1 did like twenty, twenty-five of ’em, just friends over for breakfast. Just to hang out, just to talk. 1 figure 1 drop my kids off for school, I’m up—so who wants to have breakfast at 9, 9:30? Vijay and | talked about that for a while, because it was a fucked-up thing to have to go through.”

Dustups between musicians are nothing new, Moran pointed out. “It’s always been a thing between certain kinds of musicians—like Lester Bowie and Wynton [Marsalis], or Dizzy [Gillespie] and Louis Armstrong,” he said. “The Internet makes it worse because those things become public. It’s unfortunate when people have to deal with that shit. And everybody has to, to a degree. If you're online, somebody’s going to come for you.”

“Facebook can really alter reality for people,” he said, pondering whether there were countervailing upsides to social media for musicians, beyond the obvious one of being able to publicize their performances and record releases for free. “I’ve watched it help the jazz scene because it keeps people up to date. Even pockets of scenes. 1 know a couple of cats on the West Coast. 1 would never call them to see what they’re up to, but now | kind of know, passively. People in Chicago or Miami or Houston, people in DC, Philly, New York. | love that part of it. But it doesn’t make it real. So if it l see a little ten-second clip of your gig where you play a drum solo, like, it’s a clip.

“But at the other end of the spectrum,” he continued, “l have totally been inspired by some things.” He offered Muldrow as his example. “She’s a genius. Ambrose [Akinmusire, trumpeter/composer whose acclaimed album When the Heart Emerges Glistening was co-produced by Moran] knows her, and Robert Glasper knows her. But she wrote this thing about Mingus on her Twitter page. 1 knew she comes from musicians, jazz musicians. She wrote this thing about Mingus, and | was like, ‘What’s up with that? Muldrow Meets Mingus. Well, that’s exactly what were commissioning: we’re commissioning her to write responses to Mingus’s music.”

“Did you ever see Mingus?” l asked, curious because I'd had the good luck to do so twice and not pausing to consider the unlikelihood of Moran having done so, given that Mingus’s death occurred shortly before Moran’s fourth birthday.

“No, I was too young,” he answered. “My dad saw him. But | had Jaki Byard [as a professor], so that’s the next best seat. 1 have a lot of affinity for those people. The neighborhood 1 grew up in in Houston is extremely political. Like, there was a church called Shrine of the Black Madonna that was kind of behind us. There were community centers that were very pro-black. The whole neighborhood kind of exuded this. ‘Must have pride and know your heritage? ”

“That’s weird for Texas, isn’t it?” ] asked.

“It sure is.”

But it clearly helped shape Moran’s worldview and art.

“I saw Bobby Seale“ give a lecture in Houston when 1 was sixteen,” he told me. “That’s who was coming to our neighborhood. So learning music you were always learning it with that kind of stuff in mind. And it was also the same time that Public Enemy was out. So | had something that was kind of jazz being like some historical music dealing with that shit, and then Public Enemy with the contemporary focus dealing with the same thing.”

Moran was taking on racial issues in his own career before “Muldrow Meets Mingus.” The most widely known project in that regard to which he contributed has to be scoring the 2014 feature film Selma for director Ava DuVernay, with whom Moran also subsequently collaborated on her award-winning 2016 documentary 73th, which draws a direct line from slavery and Jim Crow to the current state of the US prison system.

But composers of film scores often escape the notice of theatergoers. Moran’s own most overt and wide-ranging project exploring race was his and his wife's five-day residency at the 2012 Whitney Biennial, titled Bleed, in part for its radical bleeding of music together with performance art, dance, conversation, journalism, and a variety of visual arts. | managed to catch the final day of performances.

By then I'd already had a taste of Moran’s expansive view of how a jazz performance might differ from how they're typically staged in nightclubs. A few months earlier, I’d seen him and the Bandwagon in a double bill with Geri Allen at the 92nd Street Y in Tribeca. Their set contained freewheeling takes on some of their familiar fare—Duke Ellington’s “Wig Wise,” the standard “Body and Soul,” and Moran’s own “RFK in the Land of Apartheid,” composed for a documentary with that title.

At one point the trio broke for a mid-set listening session, cuing up a recording of Gladys Knight singing “No One Could Love You More.” The three of them sat back and chatted casually as the tune played, as if doing so were the most natural thing in the world. What they were driving at wasn’t specified. A reference to Allen’s Motown roots? A reminder of the comprehensiveness of Black American Music? But somehow the break made sense intuitively without its purpose being made explicit. The trio resumed playing to finish out the set, and Moran then brought out a couple of big boxes of gourmet cupcakes as a treat for the audience.

Į saw Alicia Hall Moran perform around that time, too, as a cast member during the Broadway production of The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess. (She also occasionally appeared as Bess, in her role as understudy to Audra McDonald.) But my introduction to her work had been a performance of her Motown Project the year before at the Regattabar jazz club in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she demonstrated that she is as much an outside-the-box thinker as her husband. Jason accompanied her on piano with Mateen on bass, joined by classical guitarist Thomas Flippin and taiko drummer Kaoru Watanabe, as she and baritone Steven Herring sang operatic arrangements of Motown hits, including “Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours,” “(Love Is Like a) Heat Wave,” and “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone.”

The Motown Project was presented during Bleed, as was an astonishing array of artistic collaborations, nearly all of which involved one or both of the Morans. These even included Alicia undergoing acupuncture to musical accompaniment, and both Jason and Alicia exploring Alexander Technique—a method of using mindful movement to reduce physical tension, also practiced by Julian Lage and other musicians—with a pair of instructors. “Alicia did it,” Moran told me during our dinner in Boston, “and then she helped me get in touch with it just for posture at the piano.”

On Sunday, two live presentations involving the Bandwagon (with Jamire Williams subbing for Nasheet Waits on drums) stood out. The first, “Live:Time,” was an hourlong work inspired by the famous quilts of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, with Alicia joining the band on vocals and Bill Frisell on guitar. The piece’s mood changed remarkably as it shifted from one portion to the next, from a taste of Moran’s trademark Gangsterism series to guitar groove to spiritual to a climax of the Bandwagon at full throttle—all interspersed with readings, including Frisell reading from a letter he had sent Moran on how to locate the isolated hamlet where the quilts were born. Later that afternoon came “Rain,” originally commissioned by Jazz at Lincoln Center. During this performance, trumpeter Ralph Alessi slowly circled the room as he played, signifying the ring shouts brought to America by African slaves. The music built in intensity and freedom as it progressed, with Abdou M’Boup on kora and Marvin Sewell on blues-infused guitar.

There were also video installations to check out between the live events. The three most memorable had racial themes. Threshold, by art critic Maurice Berger, was inspired by conversations with the Morans about what they planned for Bleed. It showed African American characters crossing thresholds in popular films and television shows, metaphors for a people’s transcendence of barriers meant to hold them down. Glenn Ligon’s The Death of Tom showed blurry images from a scene he had recreated from an early film adaption of the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Moran’s recorded piano accompanying the flickering imagery with a score Moran based on the Bert Williams song “Nobody.” Most haunting of all was Kara Walker’s use of wire and cut-paper figures to create a slow-moving, shadowy enactment of newly freed slaves being raped and murdered by an angry white mob, set to original music by the Morans.

The first interview specifically for this book took place the next day at the Moran’s home in Harlem. My wife and | had a train to catch right afterward, so she accompanied me to the interview and hung out with the family’s four-year-old twins near the grand piano while Jason and | talked at the opposite end of the spacious room.

It wasn’t long before the conversation touched on race. “I can’t imagine the built-up pressure of centuries that then allows [African American] musicians to get instruments, and how they quickly learn these instruments and decide this is the way to use them,” Moran told me at one point, describing the early evolution of jazz.

“Like that we get to Charlie Parker from Scott Joplin in thirty or forty years. It kind of just goes really quickly.” And then it keeps spawning other genres Moran adores and taps into in his own work. “I always hate when they say that jazz is America’s greatest contribution,” he continued. “What is blues? What is Motown? What is hip-hop? What is funk? What is jazz? How dare we think that jazz is more important than James Brown? This is nuts!”

Moran, like the others featured in this book, knows and respects jazz history but wants to move beyond merely preserving it. These musicians see the need for jazz to keep evolving to reflect the current times, as music did through the emergence of those other genres and as jazz’s own most important figures had all done to earn their places in the canon.

“It always weighs on me when | hear stuff like that,” Moran went on, “because 1 know jazz is great and its importance within the lineage is great. There’s two approaches. Because it has to have a canon and people have to promote the canon. That’s why there’s still a metropolitan opera.” He talked about how little new material gets staged at the Met. “They’re doing occasional new pieces or new productions of old pieces, but that’s me doing Fats Waller. I’m doing new production on old pieces. I’m actually changing the music, too. They’re not changing the music so much. The conductor might have some new ideas about what to cut, but they’re just adding different context.”

That, generally speaking, has also been Jazz at Lincoln Center’s approach to jazz. It isn’t Moran’s, but he values it. Years after the Whitney residency, during our dinner conversation, he told me that Wynton Marsalis had asked him to join his band shortly after he graduated from the Manhattan School of Music. Moran declined. “That doesn’t seem like you,” 1 said. “No,” he agreed. “It was never going to happen. Ever. But when 1 got the Kennedy Center job the first person 1 called was him. I was like, “We need to have breakfast’ 1 went in his neighborhood, and he sat me down and gave me a long talking to about what it is like in that world. It was so helpful.”

“For me, music needs Jazz at Lincoln Center,” he said. “It needs somebody that goes up there and says, “This is that old stuff and we really spent a lot of time practicing it? But on the other hand, you need people who are gonna say, Tm gonna dig in this dirt, and I’m looking for something, not even sure if there’s anything down there. Just keep digging for stuff? Its relationship to social strife, it’s relevant.

“But the thing is, you can never assume what a person’s private social strife is. And it’s quite an assumption to think that nobody’s thinking of anything because you don’t hear it. What a person like Fred Hersch battles with, kind of on an epidemic level within his body, as a homosexual within the jazz community, which is totally misogynistic. What that even feels like. Or even race from his point of view.

Those discussions are had, typically, very privately. Fred and 1, or Ethan Iverson and l, Mary Halvorson and 1, talking about stuff. Putting stuff on the table. | talk very freely with them about race, because | trust that they understand how this functions. And they do, too. They are not naive.”

He then demonstrated how this can play out by describing some of the Bleed programming that I'd missed.

“The ‘wake’ Alicia curated Friday was these powerful women, one writer from the blog Colorlines read two pieces, one about Trayvon Martin and one about misogyny in hip-hop. Another writer read a piece about how hip-hop mistreated women in general and how it was affecting her daughter. After that Joan Jonas comes up and plays this very abstract piece with the Bandwagon—we do like thirty, forty minutes. After that Kara Walker comes and gives, as usual, a very bold performance, which has the image of Condoleezza Rice at a piano while she’s reading transcripts from Abu Ghraib—you know, it’s really rough. Then it turns into ‘Brown Sugar, Rolling Stones. And the people who saw that see that this is the conversation. These are the conversations I’m constantly having with people that inform the music to a degree.

“And after that Esperanza Spalding comes up and plays a solo bass set. It was like through all that toiling of the dirt . . .” He let the thought hang a moment. “Because that’s Esperanza Spalding. You don’t think Spalding’s not having these conversations either? You think it’s just some passé beautiful music full of technique? No, it’s not. This is just how people manifest their work.”

Moran’s unwillingness to be hamstrung by jazz tradition was evident from my first contact with him, which came when | interviewed him for the Boston Globe in 2005 before a Boston performance touting his album Same Mother. Blue Note Records sent me a copy of the CD witha press release that 1 kept and filed away. It explained that the album’s title came from Alicia watching Savion Glover and observing that dance movement in jazz, blues, and hip-hop all come “from the same mother,” offering my first hint of the artistic collaboration the couple shares.

The press release also contained a quote from Moran that referenced his interest in art forms beyond music to explain his desire to absorb jazz history without permitting it to constrain his own art later: “I saw [Jean-Michel] Basquiat’s work while in high school and I’d never seen anything so raw and comprehensible. There was something rare and strange about his color scheme, multiple perspectives, line and textures. Very functional too—if a piece was too big he put hinges on it so it would fit through the door. Yet he still wanted to prove that he could ‘really draw: l came up through jazz education, came to New York to study at Manhattan School of Music, but | think a lot of my schoolmates took the rules too seriously. Therefore their personality was put on a backburner. 1 knew that was not the correct route. People like Jaki Byard taught me that you could learn the tradition, adhere to the rules just so much, and the music will never imprison you.”

What caught my eye most of all, though, was the press release noting that two cousins of Moran’s father used to stop by their home in Houston when touring with blues great Albert King. One of them had taught young Jason piano licks. Yd had a friend Tony in Chicago who played keyboards in King’s band and knew that his brother had played drums in it as well. It seemed unlikely that two sets of brothers would have toured with King, so the first thing 1 did when 1 spoke with Jason was to ask if the cousins in question were Tony and Michael Llorens. “Yes!” he replied, and suddenly we had a family connection. He put me back in touch with Tony, who had relocated to Los Angeles at some point after | left Chicago, and 1 wound up quoting him in my Globe article about what he thought of Moran’s Same Mother cover of King’s “Ill Play the Blues for You”: “When he took his solo he played all these tremolos on it. He told me | taught him to play that. Ain’t that something? You never know what a child picks up.”

Moran had then just turned thirty, a rising star with his sixth album as a leader after several years as a sideman to Greg Osby. His third, Black Stars (2001), on which he and his Bandwagon trio mates were joined by the septuagenarian master Sam Rivers on saxophone and flute (as well as introducing the track “Sound It Out” on piano, before Moran slides onto the bench beside him and takes over), had already been an important breakthrough for him four years earlier. Ben Ratliff tapped it as the final entry in his The New York Times Essential Library book Jazz: A Critic’s Guide to the 100 Most Important Recordings (2002). Gary Giddins, reviewing both the album and a New York performance for the Village Voice, praised it effusively and noted that Moran’s teacher Jaki Byard had played on Rivers’s great album Fuchsia Swing Song (1964). “The more Moran looks backward the more certain he is in moving forward,” Giddins concluded. “At 26, he is good news for jazz’s future.”

Moran’s career really began blossoming in the years to follow. In 2010, he received both his MacArthur Foundation genius grant and a teaching appointment at New England Conservatory, the latter requiring traveling to Boston several times a year from his home in Harlem to coach student ensembles and teach master classes. The next year he was hired to replace the late Dr. Billy Taylor in overseeing jazz at the Kennedy Center. His promotion to Taylor’s old title, artistic director for jazz, followed in 2014.

His move beyond music into multimedia projects began in those years as well. A few months before seeing Bleed at the Whitney, I’d reviewed a performance of Moran’s In My Mind: Monk at Town Hall, 1959 at NEC’s Jordan Hall. Commissioned several years earlier to celebrate the ninetieth anniversary of Thelonious Monk’s birth year, Moran went well beyond performing music from that concert. He teamed with videographer David Dempewolf to create a project mixing music (played by “the Big Bandwagon”—his trio augmented by horns) with, among other things, a trove of historical photographs and conversations recorded during the original Town Hall rehearsals. Moran, in the accompanying program notes, explained that taking this multimedia approach “allows me to ruminate on African-American slavery, jazz history, the piano, my life and religion.”

I was able to see two similarly expansive projects involving Moran when they came to Boston. His Fats Waller Dance Party, commissioned by Harlem Stage, was brought to the Berklee Performance Center in April 2014 by the Celebrity Series of Boston. Once again he went beyond simply making a night of performing Waller’s hits. He and Meshell Ndegeocello radically updated much of the music, modernizing it, and Moran spent a significant portion of his time performing it wearing a huge papier-maché Fats Waller mask. The cast included professional dancers, and the audience was encouraged to dance along. Seven months later, at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Moran accompanied Joan Jonas on piano as she performed Reanimation, an absorbing blend of visual and performance art inspired by Icelandic Nobel laureate Halldór Laxness’s novel Under the Glacier.

Another museum project 1 wish I’d seen was Staged (2015), for which Moran brought reproductions of New York jazz venues (the Savory Ballroom and the Three Deuces) to Brooklyn’s Luhring Augustine Museum, where the Bandwagon gave two days of performances, and charcoal-on-paper artwork by Moran was also on display. The Luhring Augustine connection also led to the debut of LOOP in 2016, Moran’s magazine of pieces by and interviews with jazz musicians. A second issue was scheduled for summer 2017.