Mike Moreno
Musician Class of 1997
Like so many other kids with a guitar, Mike Moreno steered his playing toward heavy metal at first.
“My friends were all metalheads,” he says. “To me, that was where the guitar really shines. It sounds good in jazz and blues. But there’s something molecular in the body of the guitar that just comes alive with that distortion on it.”
Though Moreno admired the heavy stuff, he says he “never felt I had an original voice playing rock music.”
He delved into jazz at HSPVA, a student of the storied Robert “Doc” Morgan.
“That’s where I discovered all this theoretical information,” Moreno says. “And I could hear John Coltrane using it. Suddenly, I was able to hear harmony in a specific way. At first I didn’t understand jazz, I just liked the energy of it. But it got to be a thing where I was putting together pieces of a puzzle. I started to see where they were supposed to go.”
Like many of the artists who pass through the school’s jazz program, Moreno graduated and headed to New York to continue his study.
He’s spent much of the past 15 years in demand as one of the top guitarists in the genre and outside it as well. Moreno has appeared on recordings by rapper Q-Tip and soul singer Bilal. He’s played on albums by other PVA alums Robert Glasper and Kendrick Scott. A piece he composed with Scott was included on the most recent album by international singing star Luciana Souza.
But Moreno doesn’t just play on the periphery. Last year, he put together a supergroup of pianist Aaron Parks, bassist Doug Weiss and drummer Eric Harland (another PVA alum) for his fifth album, “Lotus,” which comprised nine recordings that found Moreno’s gifts as a composer to match those as an instrumentalist. Moreno’s skills are in such demand that he can dedicate only so much time to being a band leader.
He spent last month touring with drummer Jochen Rueckert’s ensemble. Moreno, just last week, returned from an annual concert and workshop he holds in Brazil. Upcoming are dates playing with the Kendrick Scott Oracle, Logan Richardson’s Shift band and in Stefon Harris & Sonic Creed, gigs that take him to Thailand, Korea, Switzerland and South Africa.
“I figured out at PVA what I wanted to do, and there’s nothing to make you practice like fear,” he says. “That’s what’s so good about the school. Lots of schools have great teachers. Doc’s definitely one. But if you have great students around you, it’s inspiring. I wanted to be as good as them. And I had three years there to get good.”