BRATTLEBORO-The Vermont Jazz Center is honored to host Grammy-nominated jazz pianist and composer Jason Moran to launch its 2025–26 season of concerts.
This solo piano performance, with the theme of "Ellington in Focus," will take place at the VJC on Saturday, Sept. 20, at 7:30 p.m.
In addition being a Grammy Award nominee, Moran has been named DownBeat Critic's Poll Artist of the Year, and he has received a MacArthur Fellowship ("Genius grant").
Moran's work blends music with performance art, film, and visual media. For this concert, he will focus on the compositions of jazz's foremost composer, Duke Ellington, whose music Moran has investigated over the course of his fruitful career.
Moran has performed solo Ellington repertoire concerts at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., Boston's Berklee Performance Center, and the Hyde Park Jazz Festival in Chicago.
Although his favorite performer is Thelonious Monk, he describes Ellington as "the gold standard."
In an interview with Dave Doyle of WBGO, Moran observed that in the jazz piano lineage "there would be no Thelonious Monk attack [sound] unless Ellington showed him how - it's an inherited thing that I think piano players pass down from one to the other, and Ellington of course inherited a piano attack from people like James P. Johnson and others."
In an interview with The Boston Globe he elaborated, stating that Ellington's "touch […] almost pulls notes from the piano." Moran is a perennial student who has observed and taught the nuances of touch, technique, and style throughout the evolution of jazz piano history. In this concert, we listeners will be privy to his interpretations of Ellington's repertoire in real time, filtered through his expansive knowledge, and imbued with his intuitive responses as they take place - moment by moment.
Moran is fascinated by the places where jazz music has been created over the years.
Beginning in 2016, he constructed his first iteration of "STAGED" at the Luhring Augustine Gallery in Bushwick, New York. The show began as the re-creation of the performance spaces of two legendary, now-defunct New York City venues: the Savoy Ballroom and the Three Deuces.
For later exhibitions, he researched and re-created the stages of Slugs' Saloon (where Lee Morgan was shot and killed), and Studio Rivbea (Sam and Bea Rivers' loft in the East Village). Other museums that have presented Moran's "STAGED" dioramas include the Walker Art Center, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Venice Biennale, the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.
Moran's goal is to "fabricate those spaces," to acknowledge how architecture shapes music and to pay homage to cultural landmarks that have vanished.
The Vermont Jazz Center is honored that Moran has chosen to perform and experience its own unique venue - a concert hall with a rich history, where audiences have enjoyed jazz music in a Vermont mill-building setting since 1997.
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Re-creating concert spaces and honoring the musicians he reveres is key to Jason Moran's mission.
Demonstrating this commitment is his multimedia project that re-creates Thelonious Monk's 1959 Town Hall concert, where Moran musically reinterpreted Hall Overton's arrangements of Monk's music. The presentation also included the infusion of Monk's rehearsal recordings and visual artwork created specifically for the event.
Moran envisions that one his artistic responsibilities is to illuminate a sky-view vista of the jazz scene (both current and historical) that reflects the place, time, and vibe of the experience. One of the ways he does so is by newly reimagining historical events and places.
In an interview with Leo Sidran on his podcast The Third Story, Moran said: "You have to reckon with the idea that musicians took the bandstand not only for their own sanity, but [because] it was a place [where] they could cut loose without the fear of getting hit in the mouth or lynched. You have to say that that's generations and generations of musicians we've all watched kind of do this [to] promote the freedom principles. [...] That's a principle that people are continuing to strive for."
Moran continued: "I have to find what I feel is essential. I know that for all of the work that I've done as a musician, I will only be smarter if I learn their music and find stories that are inside […] that nobody in my music history class at Manhattan School of Music decided to teach me."
The music of Duke Ellington has always been a key ingredient in Moran's repertoire. In an interview with Boca magazine, he mentions that "one thing I've done over my recording career is record the more obscure Ellington pieces."
He continued: "Duke Ellington is like Mount Everest, but instead of the top of the mountain being cold, it's totally lush and full of sun and plant life [...]."
A representative handful of the compositions that he continues to revisit includes "Mood Indigo," "Kinda Dukish," "Single Petal of a Rose," "The Star-Crossed Lovers," and "Black and Tan Fantasy."
In his Boston Globe interview, Moran reminisced: "'Single Petal of a Rose' is maybe my prize. It's probably the first Ellington song that I learned when I was in high school that was outside of the standards that you would play on jazz gigs when you're first learning songs [...]."
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Moran has recorded over 20 albums as a leader and has appeared on countless recordings with collaborators including Shabaka Hutchings, Meshell Ndegeocello, Immanuel Wilkins, David Murray, Steve Coleman, Muhal Richard Abrams, Jack DeJohnette, Charles Lloyd, Archie Shepp, Cassandra Wilson, Joe Lovano, Don Byron, Steve Coleman, and Marian McPartland.
He has composed scores for choreographers Alonzo King and Ronald K. Brown and composed the soundtracks for Ava DuVernay's films Selma and 13th, and for Ken Burns's The U.S. and the Holocaust.
Moran has taught at the New England Conservatory, held residencies at Juilliard and the Rhythmic Music Conservatory, and until June, served as artistic director for jazz at the Kennedy Center.
He is also a visual artist whose exhibit "Black Stars: Writing in the Dark" and two examples of "STAGED" can be seen at MassMoCA through January 2026.
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In his discussion with Doyle, Moran discussed his relationship with Ellington's music.
"I'm from that same family of restless artists [like Ellington] who never quite see a boundary about where one art form ends and another begins. [...] I'd always like to think that Ellington is maybe the most supreme multimedia artist - always working with a set design, always working with lighting, always working with dancers [Alvin Ailey] and costumes; always working with film, always working with [visual artists like Joan Miró].
"I definitely am sitting under his tree," he said.
"These performances are a kind of summoning," Moran continued. "It's a performance for the audience that's in attendance, but it's really for the spirits, and you must summon the spirits."
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Tickets for Jason Moran's "Ellington in Focus" at the Vermont Jazz Center, 72 Cotton Mill Hill, #222, Brattleboro, are $25 general admission (additional donations appreciated).
Tickets are available at vtjazz.org or 802-254-9088, ext. 1, where you can also call to make arrangements for mobility accommodations and inquire about educational discounts.
Eugene Uman is director of the Vermont Jazz Center. The Commons' Deeper Dive column gives artists, arts organizations, and other nonprofits elbow room to write in first person and be unabashedly opinionated, passionate, and analytical about their own creative work and events.
This Arts column was submitted to The Commons.