Jason Moran Quotes
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America used to be proud of abstraction, and we have fallen away from it. The future depends on people trying to promote that abstract thinking. Not just in relation to music and jazz and the arts, but the economy, social strife, tension between people.
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I'm a bit of a traditionalist, but I kind of mangle things as I perform in a contemporary way.
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Jazz musicians don't make any money, so I might as well make some on the market. I pick my own stocks - Microsoft, Dell - the tech stocks, the breadwinners.
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Confidence is the key. When you're playing something new, find the part you know very well and play it really strong. That'll make you believe that you really do know it.
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I used to watch those rock videos where they would chainsaw the piano. And I thought, 'That's what I want to do.' I thought classical music was corny.
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Music, many times, around the world, serves to help us understand other people without having to talk.
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Usually, when I see films that don't have any score attached to them, I think they're beautiful. I love just the naked sound of the voice. That's already music.
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For a while, I was working on transcribing rap lyrics and then converting them into rhythmic patterns on the piano. And so in my mind, when I was taking a solo, I would be saying the lyrics and trying to play actual notes to their rhythms. Now, the influence just comes in and out in my playing.
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I don't want to be defined solely by what I do as a jazz musician at a club or a festival. That's not all of me. It's not even close.
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If you're a lay person listening to jazz, you don't necessarily understand everything that's happening within the form. But you get the sense of it, the feel of it, because you're getting to hear something that develops right in front of your face.
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As an improviser, my nature is to take a theme and constantly rework it.
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I kind of want to get the music back on a road it hasn't been on for a while. I want to promote the arts as part of the American diet.
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In school, I did a lot of computer work. I'd take splices from Kurt Weill songs and loop them in bars, in beats of seven, trying all different kinds of things.
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I'm a prime example of a person who loves hip-hop, and I will defend it till the day I die.
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Tons of musicians who I love are imprisoned by their identity. That can be totally fine because they are so amazing in their technique, but for me, I'm a little too restless for that.
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I am a huge fan of Adrian Piper: how she works, how she reveals her process in the work, how she writes about it.
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Pianos - if they don't like what you're saying, then they won't talk back to you. And you want it to talk back to you.
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The great jazz radio stations have a duty to continue evolving their format just as audiences ask the musicians to evolve. How do you do that with a form of music that has 100 years of recorded history? How do you also keep it contemporary so you don't isolate your listeners? These are major questions.