E-Mail This Article to a Friend The blues and the abstract truth (continued)

That emotional intent also affected Moran’s approach to musical content. Before, he says, "I had been conscious of trying to hide basic elements of music, basic harmonic structures or rhythmic structures. I really enjoyed pulling the covers over them so nobody could tell what was really happening, when and where. In this one, I was like, let me put the music out in the sun. Let it be without any shade, let it be exposed."

Not that Moran has turned his back completely on jazz-like abstraction. After all, he points out, there are passages of "I’ll Play the Blues for You" that are completely reharmonized. ("Those chords weren’t there before.") And there’s a Ravel-by-way-of-Ellington approach to "Fields." "I feel that jazz is great because it is abstract, but that’s also a hindrance. Because you can’t be very abstract all the time." The difference was in Moran’s attention to the special nature of each piece. "I really wanted to be conscious when I was improvising on these pieces, conscious of what my intention was and what I was trying to express about each piece in particular, the piece I wrote with Andrew Hill, or the shuffle, or ‘Gangsterism on the Rise,’ which is based on prison calls."

Despite those roots-based sources, Moran is inquisitive as ever in his choice of material — he’s included a passage from Prokofiev’s score for Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky arranged for the trio with Sewell playing acoustic slide guitar, a rumbling, orchestral tremolo-filled rise and fall of the melody. He says he bought the soundtrack after seeing the movie a couple of years ago. "It’s written for voice and orchestra, so it’s an aria really. There are two armies battling on the ice, and they’re falling through the ice into the water. And this woman comes singing this aria through this field of dead soldiers, looking for her two friends, and she said that if she lived through the battle, she’d marry one of them. I always thought that someone — anybody looking for a person and they don’t know whether they’re alive — is experiencing something that I can’t imagine. It’s a common emotion that people have felt, especially with the recent tsunami, people looking for their lost loved ones. And I’m thinking of blues not only in terms of what chord structure or what rhythm structure or what instrument is playing it but also what emotional content it would have, what the person is like just as a person on the street, without their guitar, without their piano, or without their costume of hat and coat, what that person is experiencing to make them write music." With all that in mind, he says, "This music would definitely fit the bill of what could be associated with blues."

He adds that the experience that impelled him to bring the emotional element to the fore — "to the edge of the piano rather than left behind" — was the death of his mother from leukemia last year. "It was diagnosed in April and she passed away in September. It was really quick, and for our family it was something we had never been associated with. Somebody really close to us passing away. She was young, she was healthy, it was very all-of-a-sudden."

Moran visited his mother in May, two days before the recording sessions for the new album began. Then he began making trips to Houston every three weeks to be with her and the rest of his family. "It was really wearing on me. That really forces you to be up front, with your mom or your father, about everything, because you want to make sure that you’re not cheating yourself. Because we all know that life’s never guaranteed." Moran credits both his parents for his broad interest in the arts. But his mother was especially involved in his music. "She was the person who made sure that I was playing piano, she was the one who taught me how to study and how to practice and made sure I was practicing. She sat behind me when I was at my lessons and took notes for years and years and years. She was really responsible for me at the instrument. So every time I sit down, it’s really a tribute to her."

Moran’s relationship to his own mother, then, provides another layer of significance to the album’s title. In the press notes, he points out that his wife made a connection between blues and jazz when the two saw a performance by dancer Savion Glover: "She said that jazz movement and blues movement in dance both came from the same mother, and I thought, that’s exactly it — because blues and jazz are both music where you can directly express yourself."

The Jason Moran Trio with Tarus Mateen and Nasheet Waits performs this Wednesday, February 23, at Scullers, in the DoubleTree Guest Suites Hotel, 400 Soldiers Field Road at the Mass Pike; call (617) 562-4111.