Cut from the Cloth

How Jason Moran turned quilts from Alabama into music at the Art Museum.

by Shaun Brady

Clay Patrick McBride BLANKET STATEMENT: Moran's latest commission was inspired by the Art Museum's current exhibition of quilts from Gee's Bend, Ala.

Seated on the stage of the Kimmel Center's Perelman Theater back in October, Jason Moran recoiled slightly when an audience member suggested he'd heard traces of "Southernness" in Cane, Moran's new work for string quintet. The Imani Winds had just premièred the piece, inspired by one of Moran's slave ancestors, and the pianist/composer stressed that he didn't want to take the obvious route of depicting plantation life through such literal means.

Moran's latest commission, inspired by the Art Museum's current exhibition of quilts from Gee's Bend, Ala., offered similar programmatic pitfalls. "That's always my gripe about commissions that have to do with art," Moran says, on the phone from his New York home, one eye on his napping 1-year-old twins. "They're usually, 'Oh, this is the stroke of Matisse' or 'This is the insanity of Pollack.' I'm always annoyed by those pieces when I see them, so I'm aiming at a different approach."

A devotee (he uses the word "fanatic") of conceptual art and design — his piano bench is a chair specially created for him by Danish designers KVIST Industries — Moran was already familiar with the quilts from previous touring exhibits. He even had stamps at home sporting the Gee's Bend designs. "Where once I would have associated that look with Mondrian or somebody," he says, "now it's associated with women from Alabama."

But to learn more about the creation of these quilts, he actually traveled to Gee's Bend and met with some of the women who create these quilts. The Houston-born pianist was soon reminded that there's the South and then there's the South.

"There's no hotels in Gee's Bend," Moran says, "so you stay in Selma, which is a civil rights monument. So there was a lot to contemplate just on that frontier, traveling over that bridge that Martin Luther King walked across, staying in that town. It's not quite a pilgrimage, because planes make everything seem like nothing is far, but then the drive from Selma to Gee's Bend is 40 minutes that just gets more and more rural. Eventually you're out in the woods where the roads are paved, but every once in a while you see the road that ain't paved and it's red dirt. It's quiet, and the people are — I won't say 'at one with nature,' but there's a certain patience."

Moran quickly decided to incorporate that sense of peace and quiet into his composition — a radical approach for a composer whose playing feels more like the crowded, hurried streets of his New York home than any place with a fishin' hole. "I knew to make things complicated would actually hurt how beautiful and how much a part of their way of life these quilts are," Moran explains. "So I'm actually getting rid of something that my band usually does, which is get too busy and dense and full of sound. I always describe it as pressing our music up against people's faces. This piece is the total opposite."

HALF OFF DEPOT

Why live life at full price?

Initially conflicted about the nature of an exhibition that removed folk arts or craft from its context, Moran initially planned to make the piece confront his ambiguity. But his discussions with the Gee's Bend quilters disabused him of that notion. "They aren't about that," he says. "That's all in my head. And I didn't want to put my hang-ups on these women."

Instead, he decided to write a suite of pieces each named for one of the quilt styles — housetop, bricklayer, bowtie, etc. — and also incorporate hymns traditionally sung by the quilters. The whole piece is structured around a story penned by Philly writer Asali Solomon.

For the final ingredient, Moran called on guitarist Bill Frisell to supplement his usual trio, The Bandwagon. The combination of these two innovative individualists makes this performance a can't-miss prospect. "I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to add that kind of guitar and guitar player to the mix," Moran explains. "Historically, he's dealt with what I would call American guitar sounds, and he also plays in a very angular, sparse style, so I'm aiming for the balance between those two. And the way these quilters take swatches of fabric and put them next to each other, so there's a constant weaving that happens — I thought, that's the way Bill plays all the time. So I figured he would be the perfect complement to the band."

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

Jason Moran and The Bandwagon with Bill Frisell play Fri., Dec. 12, 5:45 and 7:15 p.m., free with museum admission of $14, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2600 Ben Franklin Parkway, 215-763-8100, philamuseum.org.