Jason Moran performs mesmerizing Milton Court solo piano show

The solo performance is an opportunity for audiences to focus on a single instrument but it can also provide a closer engagement between player and listener. In this breathtaking concert Jason Moran wins hearts and minds, and occasionally feet, given the strong dance implications of some of the material, through his storytelling with word as well as sound. The Texan pianist creates a thought-provoking context for each song by anecdotes and insights on why he chooses to play them in the first place, and what they mean to him as both a human being and musician.

A primary example of this is a deeply moving rendition of Curtis Mayfield’s ‘The Makings Of You’, that distills the gospel essence of the sublime original and enhances it with the most subtle harmonic and rhythmic shifts that are given further substance by Moran stating that he had to reflect at length on how the original lent real weight to notions of love and nation building. And it made him think about these very ideas in relation to a key signature, which was, incidentally, not E-flat (favoured by Stevie Wonder among others). But the wider raison d’etre for the concert is the Barbican exhibition by African-American artist Noah Davis (whose art works are displayed below), who Moran knew well and whose ethic of making art available to all via the iconic Underground Museum in Los Angeles, resonates with the pianist’s great communicative ability and spirit of inclusion.

Moran had actually given a talk on Davis the night before the gig and emphasized the importance of images and indeed other media to his relationship with sound, and a charming anecdote on Thelonious Monk composing ‘Evidence’ after watching players on a basketball court is now consolidated by a superb run through of the all action rhythm-is-melody-beat-is-king song in which the leaps and swerves from notes under the most audacious syncopated impulse are fully energized by Moran’s percussive engagement.

His great rhythmic strength is in abundance on his original ‘Reanimation’, borne of a collaboration with another artist, Joan Jonas, in which a tide of swirling, rolling motifs brings a hard dynamism to serialist vocab, but Moran’s blues culture, so inventively deployed on albums such as Facing Left and Same Mother  is supreme on a version of Bert Williams’s ‘Nobody.’ Athletic jumps and jolts of tempo and attack culminate in a piercing right hand ostinato that is made even more so by left hand accompaniment that sounds no more than a semi-tone down, as if the two hands are practically tied at the wrist, creating a chiming if not metallic turbulence. Nothing could have struck a greater contrast to the serene grace of Coltrane’s ‘After The Rain.’ It was the opener and closer of a spellbinding set, a circular beginning and end of music by an artist who sees as much as he hears.