Jason Moran's Classic "Ten," Now on Vinyl

The great jazz pianist's breakthrough trio album as a Classic Vinyl two-fer

It may seem odd for Blue Note to reissue Jason Moran’s Ten on two LPs as part of its Classic Vinyl series. For one thing, it was recorded in 2010, a bit recent to be deemed a classic. For another, contrary to the “hype sticker” (and unlike most titles in the series), it was not “mastered from the original analog tapes,” as the album was recorded digitally. (Blue Note has since acknowledged the error.)

 Nonetheless, the album fits the category. The sound quality, though not breathtaking, is good enough. More than that, the album—hailed at the time and confirmed on rehearing 14 years later—is a classic, by any measure.

 Moran, just 35 at the time of its original release, was already (and still remains) one of the most versatile and original jazz pianists of our time. His range is vast, yet his signature distinct—a rare combination. About 20 years ago, he played a concert of piano duets at Merkin Hall, in New York, with Andrew Hill, a mentor more than 40 years his senior. It was an amazing concert, but something stuck out: Hill was playing in one style, his style; Moran was canvassing every style in the creation of his own sound. It was a generational contrast. Hill, who had led a dozen recording dates on Blue Note in the ‘60s and was experiencing a renaissance, came from the core of avant-gardists intent on making their music new. Moran emerged in the late ‘90s, when some of the most creative artists were drawing on, and fusing, music from every era, genre, and corner of the globe.

 To analogize in terms of the visual arts, Hill was one of the Abstract Expressionists (Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline), while Moran is the supreme post-modernist (in the vein of Robert Rauschenberg) who appropriates everything around him, including ready-made objects, and makes it his own. (Many years ago, when I told Moran that he struck me as “the Rauschenberg of jazz,” he smiled and said, “Rauschenberg is very important to me.”)

 I’m not casting judgment on either school. Jazz would not have advanced without the deep-dive singlemindedness of Charlie Parker, Ornette Coleman, and other innovators. At the same time, many of the younger, more eclectic musicians never escaped from the derivative, never found their own sound. Musicians from both sets often limited their horizons by their choices. (Cecil Taylor, the grand avant-garde pianist, once boasted of being able to dance to both James Brown and Albert Ayler. I would have liked to hear him play variations on James Brown, but he was trapped in his notion of who Cecil Taylor was. Moran really can play both, and much more, capturing the native idioms and weaving them in his own way.)

 Ten was so titled because its release marked the 10th year of Moran’s trio, called the Bandwagon, with Tarus Mateen on bass and Nasheet Waits on drums. It was Moran’s 8th album as a leader on Blue Note, only the 3rd Bandwagon album (a couple others featured the trio augmented by one or several musicians), and, to my ears, the first where the trio sounded like a trio—an isosceles triangle—rather than Moran-plus-a-rhythm-section.

 As far back as his 2002 album Modernistic (which critic Gary Giddins pronounced one of the great solo piano records since Monk, a verdict that holds up), Moran proved himself a musician of startling breadth (the tracks included James P. Johnson’s “You’ve Got to Be Modernistic,” Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock,” Schumann’s “Auf Einer Burg,” and one of the very few original covers of “Body and Soul” since Coleman Hawkins), stunning virtuosity (no tempo-speed or harmonic-complexity seemed beyond his limits), and extraordinary rhythmic dexterity.

 All three traits, along with a maturing emotional richness, pervaded Ten, which won most of the year’s critics prizes, catapulted Moran’s career, and, not least, solidified the Bandwagon as a great and enduring trio (now in its 15th year). Moran’s rhythmic dexterity may be his most elusive quality. I know of no jazz pianist since Don Pullen who stretches rhythm as elastically, or with such insouciance or such intensity (depending on what’s required). On Ten, listen to “Blue Blocks” or “Big Stuff,” where he speeds up the tempo, alters the chords, constructs a whole new melody, cranks it back down, and sometimes winds it back up, all seamlessly.

 And, unlike on previous trio albums, the bandmates keep up, sometimes in unison, sometimes in contrast, sometimes carving their own paths altogether but intersecting or commenting on Moran’s at just the right moments—that is, at just those moments when you wonder if the whole contraption is about to break down but you then realize it’s as tight as any fit, you’ve just been sailing a wild ride.

 They keep this up through a track list as varied as that on Modernistic—pieces by Monk, Jaki Byard (another of Moran’s mentors), Leonard Bernstein, the avant-garde classical composer Conlon Nancarrow (two takes of his “Study No. 6,” one of them glacially slow), an early 1900s “blackface” minstrel piece called “Nobody,” and seven Moran originals, including a piece at once lyrical and sorrowful from his soundtrack for the documentary RFK in the Land of Apartheid.

 The new Classic Vinyl edition also includes a rendition of Monk’s “Thelonious,” previously available only in Japan. It’s good, but not Moran’s best Monk cover.

 Moran went on to record just one more album for Blue Note, a Fats Waller tribute album with a much-enlarged band that was more a novelty than a finished product. (His live concerts of this music, where he wore a large, playful through seemingly suffocating Fats Waller face-mask, were much more energetic.) He soon after started his own label, Yes Records, which has put out eight albums of varying quality; I would highly recommend From the Dancehall to the Battlefield, The Sound Will Tell You, Bangs, and a collaboration with the visual artist Julie Mehretu called MASS {Howl, eon}. He has also recorded duets with Archie Shepp (Let My People Go) and played sideman on albums by Charles Lloyd, Henry Threadgill, David Murray, and Ron Miles.

Ten sounds very good for early high-res digital audio (24 bits, 88.2 kHz). All the instruments are clear, well-balanced, dynamic. Nothing eye-popping, but nothing that interferes with the music. It sounds a bit better than the CD—more dimensional, cymbals crisper, bass much woodier.

Classic vinyl indeed.