Top 33 Jason Moran Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Jason Moran Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

I love Mozart, and I love Bach, and Brahms, and - but a

I love Mozart, and I love Bach, and Brahms, and – but at 13, I didn’t understand any of that that I was playing.
Jason Moran
While my friends were outside practising to be Tony Hawk or Michael Jordan, I was inside playing Mozart, increasingly disillusioned and bored.
Jason Moran
Pianos – if they don’t like what you’re saying, then they won’t talk back to you. And you want it to talk back to you.
Jason Moran
If you’re a lay person listening to jazz, you don’t necessarily understand everything that’s happening within the form. But you get the sense of it, the feel of it, because you’re getting to hear something that develops right in front of your face.
Jason Moran
As an improviser, my nature is to take a theme and constantly rework it.
Jason Moran
I grew up with KTSU, and that station gave me so much info about the pantheon of black sounds: reggae, gospel, blues, soul, hip hop, and mostly they played jazz. That was a major part of how I understood music.
Jason Moran
My killer crossover project would be to combine Bjork and Grace Jones with the West Coast rappers and create this massive music. That’s, like, one of my dreams.
Jason Moran
I’m a prime example of a person who loves hip-hop, and I will defend it till the day I die.
Jason Moran
I have that huge print from Pollock by the piano because the influence is reciprocal. He was into hearing music while he created, and I sometimes do the opposite. I’m influenced by everything from an ant to a dream.
Jason Moran
From being a teacher and educator, I see the state of the music through the eyes of an 18-year-old coming on to the scene, and we want to make sure it stays intact. With my generation, it’s our duty to do that.
Jason Moran
I see how people look at me, all around the world. They see something because of the race I belong to. I have to understand that and put it into my music.
Jason Moran
Jazz musicians don’t make any money, so I might as well make some on the market. I pick my own stocks – Microsoft, Dell – the tech stocks, the breadwinners.
Jason Moran
I feel like I’m a torchbearer for jazz, fostering its tradition but its future, too.
Jason Moran
Confidence is the key. When you’re playing something new, find the part you know very well and play it really strong. That’ll make you believe that you really do know it.
Jason Moran
Very few of us have our special listening room where we close off the rest of the world and only hear the music. As musicians or as listeners, we’re generally interacting with music wherever we are, whether we’re on a train or on the street.
Jason Moran
I’m a bit of a traditionalist, but I kind of mangle things as I perform in a contemporary way.
Jason Moran
Tons of musicians who I love are imprisoned by their identity. That can be totally fine because they are so amazing in their technique, but for me, I’m a little too restless for that.
Jason Moran
Bjork’s album, ‘Homogenic,’ it’s got beats, strings, traditional Icelandic stuff. That’s my benchmark for what an album should sound like, right up there with Coltrane’s ‘A Love Supreme’ and Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going On.’
Jason Moran
The great jazz radio stations have a duty to continue evolving their format just as audiences ask the musicians to evolve. How do you do that with a form of music that has 100 years of recorded history? How do you also keep it contemporary so you don’t isolate your listeners? These are major questions.
Jason Moran
I kind of want to get the music back on a road it hasn’t been on for a while. I want to promote the arts as part of the American diet.
Jason Moran
I am a huge fan of Adrian Piper: how she works, how she reveals her process in the work, how she writes about it.
Jason Moran
America used to be proud of abstraction, and we have fallen away from it. The future depends on people trying to promote that abstract thinking. Not just in relation to music and jazz and the arts, but the economy, social strife, tension between people.
Jason Moran
Most pianists listen to about four or five different piano players before they call it quits and say, ‘Okay, I’ve got my thing together.’ Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner, Bill Evans, Keith Jarrett and maybe Chick Corea. Or maybe before that, Oscar Peterson.
Jason Moran
I’m lazy. I don’t practice enough. I do other stuff. I’m not a musician’s musician, and I don’t necessarily know if I want to be. When I hear something and want to work on it, then that’s what my project will be.
Jason Moran
You make a record because you have to chart your progress, not only for yourself, but for your audience.
Jason Moran
I play a Monk song, it’s like you get possessed. And then you have to break that spell. You have to remind yourself that you are an individual, or that you aren’t Thelonious Monk.
Jason Moran
Music, many times, around the world, serves to help us understand other people without having to talk.
Jason Moran
If you hear Thelonious Monk play a run that goes from the top of the piano, OK, he has opened up the Grand Canyon with that. He’s the river that’s carved this entire space that we call the Grand Canyon. He does that with one run. He lets you know, like, what the possibility of the sound of the piano can do.
Jason Moran
In school, I did a lot of computer work. I’d take splices from Kurt Weill songs and loop them in bars, in beats of seven, trying all different kinds of things.
Jason Moran
I don’t want any of my records to sound like one style throughout. That’s why I choose different grooves and songs: tunes that are sensitive and slow as well as pieces that are abstract and fast. The approach I want to take with my records is to give the listener a variety of grooves, concepts, and composers.
Jason Moran
I want to express what’s meaningful. I’m not into gimmicks. I want to make truthful music that’s invigorating, maintains a cutting edge, takes on different shades.
Jason Moran
Usually, when I see films that don't have any score att

Usually, when I see films that don’t have any score attached to them, I think they’re beautiful. I love just the naked sound of the voice. That’s already music.
Jason Moran
As a listener, we’re looking for that person who kind of excites the molecules within us – who knows how to tell the story that resonates deeply to our core and almost prompts us into action. Fats Waller has been that person for decades. When people need a lift, sometimes they go to him. I know I do.
Jason Moran