Piano ‘genius’ with 21st century take on Fats Waller
Festival Music
JASON MORAN has a very 21st-century take on Fats Waller, a musician whose music, although it continues to find new audiences 70 years after his death, seems to be emphatically a product of the 1920s and 30s.
“Fats is a special kind of provocateur,” says Moran, who brings his All Rise tribute to Waller to Edinburgh International Festival’s new Hub Sessions series. “It stems mainly from the fact he was a singer as well as a pianist. It has always amazed me that a pianist whose playing was so deep could sing and keep a running commentary of what was going on around him all at the same time. Sometimes he was like an MC, a hip-hop artist long before hip-hop was born.”
Moran’s vision of Waller, as a serious player who laid down the groove for people to dance to rather than the more prevalent notion of jazz being concert music, has some echoes in his own upbringing.
The New York-based Moran was born in Houston, Texas, and grew up with his father’s record collection, where the funk of James Brown sat next to the free experimentation of Henry Threadgill and country blues nestled comfortably alongside the classical masterpieces of Vladimir Horowitz. His dad’s “it’s all music” approach rubbed off on Moran, who began taking classical piano lessons as a boy with thoughts of becoming a concert pianist but one who appreciated equally the music and culture popular on the streets, and much more besides.
Thus, on every birthday his mother, who ran a bakery at the time, would present him with a cake decorated in a way that matched his latest enthusiasm. One year it was snakes, another fishing, then it was skateboarding, then hiphop until finally came the year that the cake arrived with Thelonious Monk’s name written in icing. Monk’s music generally and his piano style particularly have remained among Moran’s enthusiasms and were the subject of an earlier tribute to a jazz legend when, on its 50th anniversary, he re-imagined Monk’s 1959 Town Hall concert.
It was partly through their shared love of Monk’s idiosyncratic style that Moran and his tutor at Manhattan School of Music, Jaki Byard, bonded so well.
“I was 18 when I left for New York,” says Moran, “and here I was studying with someone who had played piano in big bands with Earl Bostic and recorded piano duet albums with both Earl Hines and Ran Blake, which is quite a leap. He had also worked with Charles Mingus and Roland Kirk as well as being devoted to Thelonious Monk.
“Jaki was a fantastic mentor and a font of musical knowledge, and he really encouraged me to think about music as broadly as possible. He had me composing music in styles from Bach fugues through to Earl Hines and beyond.”
Byard’s encouragement worked. Now recognised widely as one of the most accomplished piano players to have arrived on the jazz scene over the past 20 years, Moran has the distinction of being awarded official genius status, having been named a John D and Catherine T MacArthur “genius” fellow in 2010.
It was about a year after he had this honour bestowed on him that the Fats Waller project was presented to him by way of a commission from the New York performing arts venue Harlem Stage Gatehouse as part of its Harlem Jazz Shrines series.
“My wife, Alicia, had the idea it should be a dance party, and that struck me as very appropriate,” says Moran. “If you think about Fats, Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, Earl Hines – all of them were making the popular sounds of their era: dance music. Unlike today, where jazz audiences generally remain seated, dancing was expected when Fats showed up to a gig. He played rent parties. He played joints that, as we know from the song, were always jumpin’.”
Moran had no experience of playing for dancing, however. He also knew that although his regular band could play Waller’s music in a fairly straightforward way, dance parties aren’t really their style either. So, aware of just how strongly the song aspect would be in any survey of Waller’s work, too, he enlisted the help of singer-songwriter Meshell Ndegeocello, and over a three-year period the two musicians slowly worked out how to adapt Waller’s music for a modern audience.
Along the way the Haitian artist Didier Civil created a larger-thanlife papier-mache mask of Waller’s head for him to wear in live performances to enhance the theatrical presentation.
“It’s all quite different to what I have been used to,” says Moran. “But although it was quite daunting to begin with, I really enjoyed the challenge. A sense of spectacle is something we do not generally think about as jazz players but when people come out late at night expecting something special, we have to supply it.”
‘‘ Unlike jazz audiences of today who generally remain seated, dancing was expected when Fats showed up to a gig
Jason Moran’s All Rise: A Joyful Elegy For Fats Waller plays The Hub, Edinburgh, tomorrow. Sponsored by Russian Standard Vodka