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Jazz has tended toward the abstract ever since Louis Armstrong floated the beat away from the prosaic thump-thump of popular music in the first quarter of the 20th century. With bebop, that abstraction accelerated exponentially. Dance rhythms disappeared amid the complex beats of chattering snares and klook-mop bass-drum bombs. The popular melodies of "How High the Moon," "Embraceable You," and "I Got Rhythm" were refracted through the outer reaches of their harmonic structures — the "changes" — and horn lines jumped through their own hipster language of nonsense syllables ("salt-PEA-nuts"). Jazz de-sentimentalized pop — the emotions were there, but expressed with a tantalizing ambiguity and indirection. It was a perfect approach for instrumental music: truly music beyond words, the conventions of song structure subliminal rather than overt. And as the music moved farther out, meter and tonal centers too became ambiguous. It’s not as if this kind of musical impressionism were all that unusual. Debussy and Ravel, to name just two, had been there before. But jazz made those open harmonies its own, not to mention rhythm. It wasn’t for nothing that during jazz’s most "out" period in the late ’60s, abstract paintings began to decorate album covers. Jason Moran, who’s now 30, has danced on the edges of jazz abstraction since he began recording as a leader in his mid 20s. Yes, he did his time with the Marsalis family, and he’s always demonstrated a firm grasp of the fundamentals of swing and chord changes. His covers have included Ellington and James P. Johnson, but also Afrika Bambaataa and Bjšrk and Ravel and Schumann. A Houston native, Moran moved to New York to study at the Manhattan School of Music, fell in with Brooklyn’s M-Base crowd, which included Greg Osby and Cassandra Wilson, became the pianist in Osby’s band, and listed as his teachers Jaki Byard, Muhal Richard Abrams, and Andrew Hill. He formed a superb trio with bassist Tarus Mateen and drummer Nasheet Waits. Like Hill, he was able to extend the music to the farthest extensions of harmony and form while never losing his grip on its linear pulse. He had great fingers and independence between left and right hands, and an orchestral feel for texture and dynamics. He could fire off propulsive single-note broken patterns in his right hand while painting evocative, tension-inducing chords in his left. His music was both dreamy and earthbound — call it abstract expressionist. And aside from citing non-musical influences like the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat and kung fu movies, he drew on a wide array of source material in addition to his original compositions: Bambaataa’s "Planet Rock" and unlikely soundtrack passages from Kurosawa (Yojimbo) and Coppola (The Godfather Part II). Whether his source has been Ellington or Albert King, Ravel or Bjšrk, Moran has sought its "out" implications. So his new Same Mother (Blue Note) comes as a shock. The album kicks off with the pianist’s pounding left hand on a barrelhouse blues, "Gangsterism on the Rise," that returns in a variation at the album’s close. (It’s one in a series of similarly titled pieces that Moran says owes something of its abstract expressionist bold strokes to Basquiat.) The CD also includes Albert King’s "I’ll Play the Blues for You," the unabashed blues shuffle "Jump," and plenty of Marvin Sewell’s gritty electric-guitar and delicate acoustic slide work. Even when some pieces (especially the folk ballad "Aubade," written with Andrew Hill, and the rhapsodic solo piano piece "Fields," written with Moran’s wife, the classical soprano Alicia Hall Moran) make excursions into free dissonance or dreamy impressionistic reveries, the straight-blues stamp suffuses the album. When New York Times critic Ben Ratliff heard Moran’s trio with Sewell at a live show, he wrote, "Many jazz musicians regard blues as a harmonic structure in which to fit swing rhythm and jazz-group interaction. . . . But when Mr. Moran thought blues, he also thought of shuffle beats and Texas guitar players; blues as blues style, not jazz-as-blues or merely blues form." The difference between this direct approach to the whole enchilada of blues performance and the usual jazz path is one that Moran, who plays Scullers on Wednesday, readily acknowledges when I reach him by phone at his home in New York. "I really wanted to make sure that I was in contact with the emotional element of the music. I had accomplished that sometimes on previous recordings and performances, but there was something about me that had been running from some basic notions of what I thought music could do — notions of emotion, notions of presentation, and notions of being proud of where you’re from and what that sound is, the sound you associated with your culture or your neighborhood. And this record put me in that frame of mind: rather than ‘I’m a New Yorker, let me reflect on my New York,’ I’m a Texan living in New York, let me reflect my Texas."
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