Moran, Jason (1975- )

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      Ron Miles Headlines the Village Vanguard, at Last, as the Club Reopens

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      The cornetist led a quintet featuring Jason Moran, Bill Frisell, Thomas Morgan and Brian Blade as the 86-year-old establishment came back to life after its pandemic shutdown.Ron Miles has a dusty and unvarnished sound on cornet that hints at his Rocky Mountain roots, and unlike your typical high-brass improviser, he hardly ever resorts to flash or big pronouncements. Onstage he’s unhurried, low-key and playing for the audience, yes, but not directly to it.All of which helped make his quintet’s early set at the Village Vanguard on Saturday night feel comfortable, even familiar, despite it being Miles’s first week leading a band at the storied club — and his shows being the Vanguard’s first after 18 months of lockdown.There was an air of celebration as the 86-year-old establishment came back to life, but the way to engage with it was seemingly to pick up right where things left off, letting the music do its work.Patrons returning to the club found it largely unchanged after the long pause.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesThe tiny white bistro tables and wooden chairs were just as before, knocked closely together between the venue’s obtusely angled walls, all lined with leather benches. The simple laminated drink menus were unchanged, except for a sticker on each one with a handwritten “Modelo” replacing the Stella Artois.But a big part of the night’s easy, familial feeling came from the fact that the members of Miles’s all-star quintet were all Vanguard regulars. Everyone but the band’s leader had previously headlined at the club in his own right: the pianist Jason Moran, the guitarist Bill Frisell, the bassist Thomas Morgan and the drummer Brian Blade.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesMiles, 58, has spent most of his life in Denver and has only recently begun to garner the heavy national attention he was due, and it’s come thanks to this band. He had booked this engagement with the club’s management far in advance, after the quintet had released its debut album but before last year’s equally spellbinding release, “Rainbow Sign.” When the Vanguard decided to align its reopening with Broadway’s, in mid-September, Miles’s became the first date on the schedule that stood.The cornetist first convened the quintet in 2016 as an extension of a trio that he had long maintained with Blade and Frisell. Everyone in the group spent at least his adolescent years west of the Mississippi River — Louisiana, Texas, Colorado, California — and Miles’s slyly swinging compositions are built perfectly to find the natural simpatico between these musicians. Steeped in American roots music, 1950s cool jazz and the musical openness of Don Cherry, it never feels settled but almost always seems centered on a search for shared comfort.Appearing onstage with the band just after 8 p.m., Miles allowed a pregnant silence to build before beaming out one evenly held note; Moran responded with a low and cloudy chord, striking it just half a moment behind Miles. Frisell’s guitar, run through reversed effects and sudden loops, added an electric charge to their earth tones.It was Morgan who started, finally, to set a firm pulse, though he built it in response to Blade’s scattered strokes on the snare and bass drums, which implied a flow. The tune became slowly recognizable as “Like Those Who Dream,” the opener from “Rainbow Sign.” The musicians bent in and out of blues form as they moved into a steady three-beat pattern, and solos folded neatly into composed sections.The drummer Brian Blade and the guitarist Bill Frisell on the Vanguard stage.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesThe set started with long, expansive renditions of original compositions, and ended with a diptych of short, pithy pieces: a quick-hit take on Lee Konitz’s cool-jazz classic “Subconscious-Lee” and a short version of “The Rumor,” a pool of harmony and tone that serves as the centerpiece of the new album.Miles knows about fitting his voice into another musician’s band; most of his higher-profile work had been as a side musician, and he makes himself indispensable by paying attention to a group’s entire sound, in the way that a bassist or a pianist might.He encouraged the same approach from his bandmates here by not only writing to their natural strengths but by presenting each member with a score that shows the entire band’s parts, rather than just their own.Miles’s skills as an accompanist were in evidence too on Saturday. On “Queen of the South,” another original from the new album with a memorable, folklike melody, after the solo section ended and the band reclined back into the melody, Miles capered happily around it, adding bright coloration and cross-swipes of rhythm.He followed with “Let’s,” an up-tempo tune by Thad Jones, the trumpeter and Vanguard icon, hoisting up the energy and the tempo but not the volume. Moran stayed out as Frisell improvised, starting with spare gestures and getting more creative, treating his solo like an engine being rebuilt one part at a time. Miles took his own solo quickly off the harmonic map, tugging against whatever structure had set in with the swing feel.After “Let’s,” Miles took the microphone off its stand for the first and only time that set, and spoke as if this was just a normal night of music in a highly special place. “We are blessed to be here and blessed to be in this hallowed space,” he said. “We’re going to play some more music for you.”There was an air of celebration as the club came back to life.An Rong Xu for The New York Times More

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      Review: A ‘Party in the Bardo’ for a City in Transition

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      At the Park Avenue Armory, Laurie Anderson and Jason Moran gathered fellow artists to conjure a sonic environment haunted by the pandemic.New York City is in a liminal state: partially vaccinated while still in the grip of Covid-19; beckoning cautiously masked people outside with the blossoming spring; and reopening indoor performance venues at last, but with caveats that color every show with reminders of the continuing pandemic.This moment of in-betweenness is like “that scene in the movie when the prisoner wakes up, and the jail door has swung open and no one’s around,” the polymathic artist Laurie Anderson said on Friday during “Party in the Bardo,” her collaboration with the jazz luminary Jason Moran at the Park Avenue Armory. “So … what’s happening next? Can I just go?”Anderson supplied violin and vocals in between sections of poetic spoken word.Amr Alfiky/The New York TimesFacing Anderson from the opposite side of the room was Moran at the piano.Amr Alfiky/The New York TimesThere’s another fitting metaphor, the one that gives Anderson and Moran’s project its title: the bardo, the Tibetan Buddhist transition between death and rebirth that has been described as a 49-day process during which energy prepares to take on a new life. It’s a long-held preoccupation of Anderson’s, the theme of her poetic 2015 film, “Heart of a Dog,” and the namesake of a late-night radio show she hosted last year as part of a Wesleyan University residency — also called “Party in the Bardo,” whose guests included Moran.“Party in the Bardo” — the version at the Armory, presented to an audience of a little more than 100 in its 55,000-square-foot drill hall — is, like many projects by both Anderson and Moran, difficult to label. It would be too limiting to call it a performance or an elegy. Or an installation, though it included one in the form of “Lou Reed: Drones,” a sound-bathlike work assembled from Reed’s guitars by his former technician Stewart Hurwood. (Reed, who died in 2013, was Anderson’s partner for the last two decades of his life.)Lou Reed’s guitars resounded in “Lou Reed: Drones,” assembled by his former technician, Stewart Hurwood.Amr Alfiky/The New York TimesThe tai chi master Ren GuangYi continuously practiced under a spotlight.Amr Alfiky/The New York TimesMore than anything, “Party in the Bardo” is a vibe — an hourlong immersion into an environment that is both intensely visual, with continuous tai chi by Ren GuangYi and Haobo Zhao, and a large mirror ball kinetically reflecting lights on every surface of the drill hall; and chaotically musical, with Anderson, Moran and a small group of fellow artists in a series of structured, often simultaneous improvisations layered atop “Drones.” Those of us in the audience were given cardboard mats, to feel it all through the floor if we wanted. I spent a good 20 minutes lying in savasana, vibing.Spread throughout the space, the players — Louie Belogenis and Stan Harrison on saxophone, Susie Ibarra on percussion and Vernon Reid on guitar, in addition to Moran on piano and Anderson on violin and vocals — were not unlike the ethereal, chattering personalities in the colloquy-as-novel “Lincoln in the Bardo,” by George Saunders. There were distinct notes, distinct voices, but they were only fleeting, coming and going as quickly as the lights on the floor.Vermon Reid offered structured improvisations on guitar.Amr Alfiky/The New York TimesAnd Stan Harrison played saxophone, along with Louie Belogenis.Amr Alfiky/The New York TimesThe clearest sounds came in moments of transition: at the start, Anderson bowing the lowest string of her violin while Moran rumbled the piano’s deepest registers as if building a foundation; and at a later ebb, when the drones were pierced by painfully human wails coming from the saxophones at opposite ends of the room.Two readers, Afrika Davis and Lucille Vasquez, spoke text I couldn’t make out until I realized, near the end, that it was a list of the pandemic’s victims. How many, of the nearly 33,000 in New York City alone, could have been named in an hour? To do them justice would require mourning on a mass scale — bigger than Friday’s artistic expression of grief for a privileged few.Members of the audience were provided with cardboard mats to lie on and feel the music’s vibrations through the floor.Amr Alfiky/The New York TimesWith the worldwide death toll continuing to inch higher by the day, it will take time to truly process the tragedies of the past year. It will take time, too, for live performances to resume comfortably. During the curtain call at the Armory, the artists bowed with their arms out but their hands at a safe distance — a reminder that we may have spent an hour partying in the bardo, but we are still very much in it.Party in the BardoThrough Sunday at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.org. More

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      6 Jazz Songs to Listen to Right Now

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      6 Jazz Songs to Listen to Right NowAngel Bat Dawid.Alejandro AyalaI write about jazz for The New York Times.Here are six new and noteworthy tracks, from a recently unearthed Don Cherry radio broadcast to Angel Bat Dawid’s remix of Alan Braufman → More

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      Cardi B’s Gleefully Relentless ‘Up,’ and 12 More New Songs

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe PlaylistCardi B’s Gleefully Relentless ‘Up,’ and 12 More New SongsHear tracks by Bomba Estéreo, SG Lewis, Flock of Dimes and others.Cardi B barely offers listeners a chance to catch their breath on her new solo single, “Up.”Credit…YouTubeJon Pareles, Giovanni Russonello and Feb. 5, 2021, 11:48 a.m. ETEvery Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Cardi B, ‘Up’[embedded content]On “Up,” her first solo single in several years, Cardi B’s preferred method of annihilating the haters is oxygen deprivation — her flow is so relentless that for nearly three minutes she doesn’t offer listeners a single moment to catch their breath. “Big bag bussin’ out the Bentley Bentayga/Man, Balenciaga Bardi back,” she raps with rapturous alliteration, before running that tongue twister back again, in case you didn’t catch it all the first time. “Up” is a homage to the steely Chicago drill sound that Cardi grew up on, and it also finds her reuniting with DJ SwanQo, who worked with her on the hardest-hitting song on “Invasion of Privacy,” “Get Up 10.” (He co-produced “Up” with Yung Dza.) Her tone is a bit more gleeful than the drill influence would suggest, and there are of course some classically comedic Cardi punch lines here, but the ravenous way she digs into this beat is serious business. LINDSAY ZOLADZSG Lewis featuring Nile Rodgers, ‘One More’Choices, chances. SG Lewis sings about the ways an encounter at a party could go: Will it evaporate amid distractions, or will continuing the conversation for just one more song and lead to romance? Either way, it’s a dance party, and the guitar scrubbing away at complex chords over the neo-disco beat belongs to the disco and dance-pop wizard Nile Rodgers. JON PARELESSia and David Guetta, ‘Floating Through Space’How far has the pandemic lowered the bar for triumph over adversity? “You made it another day, made it alive,” Sia sings over David Guetta’s echoey, synthetic adaptations of a Caribbean soca beat. It’s computerized happiness for a worldwide predicament. PARELESMiss Grit, ‘Grow Up To’Miss Grit is the alias of Margaret Sohn, a Michigan-born New York transplant who, like St. Vincent, is equally enamored of both textured guitar distortion and crisp, clean melody. (When Sohn was a student in NYU’s music technology program, she briefly considered a career in making effects pedals.) Miss Grit’s self-produced second EP, “Impostor,” is a confident and searching meditation on that psychological scourge Impostor Syndrome and her outsider status as a Korean-American growing up in the Midwest. But the single “Grow Up To” is more of an abstraction — albeit a hypnotically catchy one. Beneath a vocal with a hazy, deadpan cool that recalls Mary Timony, Sohn retraces the melody line with her guitar, snaking and sparking like a lit fuse. ZOLADZBomba Estéreo featuring Okan and Lido Pimienta, ‘Agua’Folklore, mysticism, nature and electronics converge in “Agua,” the first single from an album due in April by the Colombian group Bomba Estéreo, joined by Toronto-based expatriates: the Colombian singer Lido Pimienta and the Afro-Cuban vocal duo Okan. Voices harmonize to chant the four ancient elements — “Agua, tierra, aire, fuego” (“water, earth, air, fire”) — over traditional-sounding drums, handclaps and bird calls; then the synthesizers appear, blipping and arpeggiating, as Pimienta and Bomba Estéreo’s Li Saumet sing and rap about being inseparable from the natural world. PARELESFlock of Dimes, ‘Two’“Can I be one? Can we be two?” Jenn Wasner asks on her stirring new single “Two.” The song — and its colorful, playfully choreographed video, directed by Lola B. Pierson and Cricket Arrison — is an exploration of the simultaneous needs for individuality and intimacy within a romantic relationship, but it also reflects the multiplicity of Wasner’s musical output. With her collaborator Andy Stack, she’s one-half of the band Wye Oak, while as a solo artist she releases music under the name Flock of Dimes. “Two” is driven by an irregular beat (Wasner recently joked on Twitter about her penchant for “odd time signatures”), as if to mirror the hesitant questioning of its lyrics. Even when she’s being somber or ruminative, Wasner has a touch of gallows humor, as when she muses memorably, “We’re all just wearing bodies like a costume til we die.” ZOLADZAlan Braufman (Angel Bat Dawid remix), ‘Sunrise’A slow, billowing, rafters-raising saxophone melody — distinctly in the spiritualist free-jazz tradition of Albert Ayler — becomes just one element in a digital swarm in this remix of a tune by the saxophonist Alan Braufman, from his 2020 quintet album, “The Fire Still Burns.” With the young multi-instrumentalist and composer Angel Bat Dawid at the controls, the track begins as a saxophone reflected upon itself, bouncing around the walls of an electronic prism; that leads into a steady, clipped, electronic beat, somewhere between deep house and ambient music. A veteran of New York’s jazz loft scene of the 1970s, Braufman only recently resuscitated his public career as a musician. “The Fire Still Burns,” featuring an intergenerational cast of side musicians, was a triumphant claim to artistic vitality, at age 69. This Dawid remix is another indication of what it means to stay engaged decades on, bringing the tradition ahead. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOVic Mensa featuring Wyclef Jean and Chance the Rapper, ‘Shelter’“I’ll be your shelter,” Wyclef Jean promises, sometimes in a sweet falsetto and sometimes with hoarse vehemence, over mournful, syncopated guitar chords. But the track, even with hints of hope at the end, is an elegy, and raps by Vic Mensa and Chance the Rapper matter-of-factly set out how many people aren’t sheltered from disease, poverty and racism: “Hospital workers in scrubs with no PPE/But they got money for riot gear,” Mensa observes. PARELESH.E.R., ‘Fight for You’How’s this for building anticipation: H.E.R.’s new song was nominated for a Golden Globe a day before it was even released! The soulful “Fight for You,” from the soundtrack of the upcoming Black Panther drama “Judas and the Black Messiah,” strikes an appropriate balance between period-pic scene-setting and up-to-date cool, as lyrics like “all the smoke in the air, feel the hate when they stare” draw unfortunate parallels between past and present. ZOLADZJimmy Edgar featuring 24hrs, ‘Notice’The producer Jimmy Edgar has far-flung connections. He has collaborated with producers including Sophie and Hudson Mohawk and rappers like Danny Brown. The Atlanta rapper 24hrs sing-raps assorted phrases in “Notice,” but all the action is in the track: viscous bass tones stopping and starting, little whistling interjections, double-time boings and swoops and tinkles. There’s a slow, determined push forward, but at any given moment, it’s impossible to predict where it will land. PARELESArchie Shepp and Jason Moran, ‘Wise One’You can hear history coursing both ways, future sloshing up against past, as the pianist Jason Moran and the saxophonist Archie Shepp revisit John Coltrane’s “Wise One.” When Moran pulls an arpeggiated rumble into a rhythmic flow, or splashes a fistful of high notes onto the keyboard behind Shepp’s high warbling cry, it’s almost impossible to say whether the younger pianist is guiding his elder down a new path, or following his lead. Shepp became a Coltrane apostle more than half a century ago, and it was Trane who brought Shepp to Impulse! Records, helping him build a reputation as one of the leading jazz innovators of the 1960s. Moran came up decades later, idolizing them both. Shepp and Moran’s album, “Let My People Go,” is out now — only the latest in a long history of memorable piano-sax duet albums by Shepp, including ones with Mal Waldron and Horace Parlan. RUSSONELLOVampire Weekend, ‘40:42’ remade by Goose and Sam GendelEver conceptual, Vampire Weekend called on musician-fans to remake “2021,” a minute-and-a-half ditty about relationships and the passage of time (“Copper goes green, steel beams go rust”) from its 2019 album “Father of the Bride.” There were conditions: Each remake was to last exactly 20 minutes and 21 seconds, to be combined for an EP entitled (do the math) “40:42.” Both acts rose to the occasion. Goose, a methodical jam band from Connecticut, did a live jam, on video, with clear landmarks of Minimalistic stasis, playful crosscurrents and dramatic, attentive buildups. Sam Gendel, a saxophonist who has worked with Ry Cooder, Perfume Genius and Moses Sumney, came up with multiple, Choose-Your-Own-Adventure scenarios: breathy woodwind chorales, abstract modal drones, electronic meditations and loops, cozy fireside acoustic session, raucous jazz finale. Musicians delight in working with limited parameters and leaping beyond them. PARELESAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      The Blockbuster ‘Drivers License,’ a Possible Reply and 7 More New Songs

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      @media (pointer: coarse) { .at-home-nav__outerContainer { overflow-x: scroll; -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch; } } .at-home-nav__outerContainer { position: relative; display: flex; align-items: center; /* Fixes IE */ overflow-x: auto; box-shadow: -6px 0 white, 6px 0 white, 1px 3px 6px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.15); padding: 10px 1.25em 10px; transition: all 250ms; margin-bottom: 20px; -ms-overflow-style: none; /* IE 10+ */ […] More