The blues and the abstract truth Jason Moran takes his music out into the sun BY JON GARELICK

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 Björk 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 Björk, 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. "

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 in Allston, Massachusetts; call (617) 562-4111.