Jason Moran’s Solo Piano Gig at SFMOMA

Jazz pianist Jason Moran (photograph by Clay Patrick McBride, from his SFMOMA event page)

Yesterday afternoon at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), jazz pianist Jason Moran gave a solo performance in the Gina and Stuart Peterson White Box to complement his contribution to the SOFT POWER exhibition. As the Web page for this exhibition states, the project “is about the ways in which artists deploy art to explore their roles as citizens and social actors.” Moran’s presentation “considers the radical potential of the dream state as a waking vision state in which information is transmitted between dimensions of reality to affect a contemporary moment.” It was motivated by his conversation with dream therapist and poet IONE and linguist jessie little doe baird included in the exhibition catalogue.

Moran performed his solo piano gig in the center of the White Box space, surrounded by “in the round” seating for the audience. All seats were occupied, along with a generous number of “standing room” attendees along the four surrounding walls of the space. Nevertheless, as the performance developed, many of the seats were vacated, leaving behind the serious listeners whose attention was more than adequately rewarded.

To be honest, however, I was unable to make the connection between Moran’s contribution to the exhibition and the music he was performing. If he was documenting his own “dream state,” he did so with highly attentive precision and an impressive breadth of both thematic and stylistic diversity. Presumably, most of what he was playing was his own improvisation, much of which may well have been spontaneous. This involved a broad survey of keyboard techniques; but, for the most part, the performance involved the development of a succession thematic elements, somewhat in the spirit of the extended uninterrupted improvisations that Keith Jarrett brings to his solo performances but very much in Moran’s own jazz voice.

The one exception to this overall plan was a brief venture into the music of Thelonious Monk. Moran began with an extended account of “’Round Midnight,” tacking a bit of “Crepuscule with Nellie” on towards the end of the take. I was particularly struck by how Moran evoked a synthesis of his own style with Monk’s. This was most evident in the “’Round Midnight” section, where Moran developed an elegant fabric in which some of Monk’s idioms were seamlessly woven together with Moran’s own inventive passages.

Personally, I found so much to occupy my conscious attention that I gave little thought to any dream state!