As I’ve said incessantly, Zac took me to see Jason Moran. I didn’t have time to write until now, so you are seeing my responses in real time, because my thoughts were occupied with other things.
Everything on the program was by Duke Ellington and/or Billy Strayhorn.
Jason was the person I’ve known since I was 14. Too hip for the room in some places and instantly accessible in others. He is an artist that pushes me to the wall, and always has, because I love his dissonance. When I hear Jason, I hear Langston Hughes in my head at all times, the “I, Too, Sing America” of it all. The tension in America is apparent, and expressing it in music the way Jason does is transcendent. Sometimes, his playing is romantic and sensual. Sometimes, it’s Charles Ives’ America. And that’s all in one chart. No piece he played elicited one emotion. It elicited all of them.
The first thing I noticed is that the tickets Zac got for us were the place I usually sat in the Denney Theater to watch him. So, even the angle of his face was the same. In the dark, it was hard to keep straight who was actually at the piano, because my mind was constantly switching back and forth from both of us as teenagers and both of us in our late 40s. The only difference is that in concert when he was a kid, Jason seemed more shy/introverted than he does now.
If he was playing with his combo, he rarely said a word. His music stood for itself……. and far apart from the rest of us. Jason is one of the few people I met at HSPVA that I considered a prodigy even then, though it has grown stronger in retrospect. That’s because he understood music theory to a level that seemed unprecedented for a kid his age.
I would say that he hasn’t grown as an artist so much as he has refined his technique. His ideas have always been extraordinarily forward-thinking. For instance, I’ve always found it funny that he quotes Björk as an influence. 😉
The great “I Too, Sing America” moment for me was a chart called “Black & Tan.” It was a conversation between the bass and the treble, a terrible storm. In my own mind, I was trying to figure out the war Ellington and Strayhorn were trying to portray. I feel guilty that I am describing a concept that should be black voices first, but I also can’t describe jazz without describing the black experience because not only is life pain, so is music.
In my head, I wondered if it was a tribal war in Arica, a race-based war in the United States, or colorism. I wonder if it was really about a thunderstorm. Also, Jason didn’t stop between every piece, so I’m sorry if I’ve put the wrong name on the right storm. It was incredible. The anger was so deep and frightening at one point I thought he was playing directly on the strings. Even if it was a literal storm, and not lashing out at the white establishment, those are the feelings that came up for me because…..
I, Too, Sing America. I am raging at the same system because my queerness, physical disability, and neurodiversity make me a minority, too. I have not found that white people like any minority, really, because different is scary. Different is the bass line raging, because it’s always on the minority to change…. fit in. I think the queer community lost white cishet people in some respects with nonbinary, because people naturally put things in boxes and recognize things by pattern.
“How do you know she is a man?”
“SHE LOOKS LIKE ONE!”
Joke’s on them because it’s not my job to be their “witch.” It’s not my job to be a scapegoat for anything. “Riots are the language of the unheard” (MLK, Jr.), but no riot has ever gotten big enough to change white behavior. Wasn’t it Will Smith who said, “racism isn’t getting worse, it’s getting filmed?” It’s the same with homophobia and transphobia. Those slights haven’t ever stopped happening because Karen’s screaming on YouTube again.
When you want to go back to “the good old days,” remember that all of us do not view history kindly. In the 50s and 60s, the idealistic Pleasantville that never existed excepted in cishet white minds:
- Women had no access to legal, safe abortions. Women didn’t have their own money to escape a bad situation because they didn’t have credit cards or bank accounts in their own names before 1974.
- Gay men were routinely arrested for “homosexual activity,” and not even quietly. If you were arrested for the crime of sodomy, the police would print your name in the newspaper so that by the time you got out of jail, your life was absolutely ruined.
- It was not as bad for lesbians, because men aren’t threatened by them….. again, we had no agency and sex between women was not real. So, we were definitely punished, but not in the same ways. Until 1974, we were forced into marriage, sometimes violently, but in reality there was no other choice. If we wanted to be monogamous and dedicated to each other, we couldn’t have bank accounts or credit cards. We are forced into sex violently because so many men are threatened by us. Either we need to be taken down a peg because we shouldn’t be so confident, or they’re convinced that it’s not men. It’s the other men……. you would be frightened at the total if I had a nickel for every man who has ever told me that I’d change my mind if I had his dick in particular. This is the standard joke that men make with lesbians when they don’t know what else to say……. but sometimes those words are extremely sinister. Straight women aren’t the only ones that have to walk with their car keys in their knuckles. Men are threatened by women who aren’t dependent on them, full stop. If I am also dating women, that means I could get a woman you didn’t, and that is unacceptable.
- Trans women, when they were allowed to exist at all, were limited to sex work a LOT of the time. It’s how you had to support yourself, not how you wanted your life to be.
- We did not have words or descriptions of what nonbinary might be, as language hadn’t evolved that far. But, because there is such a focus on gender roles in America, lots of parents were and still are terrible because they start getting wigged at child’s play. In that day and age, the punishment for playing with dolls while male and playing war while female was steep. There was not enough research on homosexuality to see that it was naturally occurring, so the moment their son wanted an EZ Bake or their daughter wanted to play baseball (NOT softball), it was game on. We are going to reprogram the shit out of you.
- Many people think that Civil War monuments in the South were put up at the time. They weren’t. Most, if not all remnants of the Confederacy were put up during Jim Crow, to do exactly what white people have insisted they don’t do ever since………. reinforce a black person’s place. The white savior trope speaks to a lot of people, but it’s a type of gaslighting to change history and look back on Jim Crow as a time when blacks were struggling and there were so many white people that helped along the way……. making the white savior the hero of the movie and not about the black people who are living that experience, painfully, every day.
I have never walked a mile in a black or trans person’s shoes, but I can tell where they pinch.
My genderqueerness gets me stares in the women’s bathroom all the time because conservatives women have been taught to fear trans women in the bathroom……… and of course, they wouldn’t blink twice at a trans man, but I’m nonbinary so they have no idea which direction I’m going, because their gut reaction is to pick one.
But, sometimes, just like symbolism an author never meant, rain is just rain.
“My name is Gilbert.”
(You’re welcome, three people who will get that joke. My dad will fall on the floor if he remembers what I’m talking about………………… it’s a major throwback.)
Black and Tan created this essay for me, as Jason has done for me for many years. As I told him last year, I wrote to “Ten” for a year. And then Matt Mullenweg (another PVA grad) was on Tim Ferris and he said that he listens to one track over and over so that he can concentrate on coding instead of on music (he was a sax player).
The Moran track I use is “RFK in the Land of Apartheid.” It”s the bass line that moves my fingers. I’ll put a video at the end, because I’m not sure whether the concert was recorded or not.
Go into it with an open mind. Some of you may have never heard music like this before. If you are any kind of artist, when you listen close your eyes for a moment and drown everything else out. Some pieces take more attention to understand than others.
Like whether Black & Tan was a race war or a rain storm.
I would also be remiss not to mention “Melancholia,” which he dedicated to his mother, who passed…. and “all your mothers.” No one could have played a piece for me like that who hadn’t lost a parent. There’s too much pain, too much turmoil, too many things left unsaid, too many dreams dashed for the future. One of the reasons it took me so long to open up to a relationship with a romantic partner is feeling like it wasn’t worth it if my mother didn’t get to meet them.
She would have loved Zac, and I could tell you exactly why and how, but I’d have to check with him to see if I can use that conversation or not. I do know that she would be very impressed with his dreams for the future, and because of it, his dreams made me take a breath to keep tears from falling.
I felt my mother the whole evening, looking down. Jason, I’m sorry, but she thought Alejandro Vela hung the moon, for all I tried to convince her. This is because my mother was also a pianist, and she was sitting at an angle where she could see Vela’s hands.
The next Wednesday, she was in charge of the devotional after choir, and she told the story of coming with me to see Vela and that she’d always had trouble with “Rhapsody in Blue,” and that the God moment was seeing him move hand over hand….. or something like that. I’ve slept since then.
I guess you had to be there.
So, I teased her that I thought Jason could probably play Gershwin in his sleep….. she could have Alejandro all to herself.
I was just impressed that me and my weird little group of friends actually impressed her. 😉 I wasn’t in the Wind Ensemble that did Rhapsody, but I’m not worried. I’ve played some of the greatest jazz charts ever written, and soloed on a few.
Last night, I got to remember who that kid was, and in retrospect, they were pretty great…………….
Thanks in large part to all the Jason Moran concerts I’ve seen over the last 32 years. To watch an artist grow is one of the most pleasurable things on earth. Jason is never afraid to try anything- and if I see which direction he’s going, I’ll go with him.
JaMo, thank you for everything……. from the minor seconds all the way to C major.
Stories That Are All True 