Music develops through time and history by a process of the accretion of knowledge: new discoveries are made, new possibilities imagined, new styles synthesized, and all this on the shoulders of giants who came before. Of course, this is true for classical music, where this knowledge has been propagated through scores, but also true for jazz, where knowledge spreads through an oral/aural tradition. With its relatively short history, jazz came along at the right moment to take advantage of recording technology to spread the ancient oral tradition farther than the carry of the voice. This means that with essentially the entire history of jazz available in recordings, musicians are free of contemporary trends, free to pick a path of that oral/aural tradition to follow, no matter how old-fashioned. While this is not necessarily a good thing for a music that requires constant and immediate recreation (and where jazz-as-museum-object can have a stifling influence), it does create the opportunity for musicians to bring the past into the present and make both as new as possible. One musician who certainly does that, and who does it by reaching deeper into the past to times before the origins of jazz, is Jason Moran. His new and immensely satisfying CD Artist in Residence [Blue Note 62711], is a synthesis of new jazz and American traditions, technology and the style and spirit of Romantics like Schumann and Brahms.

In the history of styles in jazz (Trad players, Be-Boppers, Hard-Boppers, Free players), Moran is a pretty rare breed, which is clear on his solo recording Modernistic [Blue Note 39838], right in the title cut, James P. Johnson's "You've Got To Be Modernistic." Moran plays stride piano, something almost closer to ragtime than to jazz, and he plays it in the 21st century as a musician who has incorporated lessons from giants who came after Johnson: Art Tatum, Duke Ellington, Monk, touches of Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra (each in his own way deeply connected to the roots of jazz), and especially his teacher Jaki Byard. Featuring the tune is a way of showing where he comes from as an artist: the cosmopolitan roots of a music first formed when there was still a strong flavor of the myths of a pastoral America, and a direct connection to the blues, so that stride and even ragtime, proto-jazz both, could convey an aesthetic of nostalgia for a past already sepia-toned. Ragtime and the beginnings of stride piano were also born within a lifetime's reach of the beginnings of European Romanticism, arguably a cognate of American blues, and it is that music as well, music with roots in human emotions, which informs Moran's style.

It is worth surveying some of his earlier recordings a bit, because the new one is more comprehensible and enjoyable when heard as a synthesis and development of the earlier stages of Moran's artistic path. Modernistic is packed full of the type of choices in material that serve as a guidebook for Moran's aesthetic. Along with his own pieces, he plays an impressive version of "Time Into Space Into Time" by Muhal Richard Abrams, a brilliant arrangement of "Body and Soul" where he mines the original for a surprising and evocative vamp that is both contemporary and unmistakably the song itself, and most tellingly from the point of view of musical history he plays his own solo arrangement of the early hip-hop hit "Planet Rock" and of "Auf Einer Burg" by Schumann. The former represents a technique he has been developing with increasing success, deriving musical material from recorded speech--in this case he plays a piano melody of the original rapping on the track. The only other musician I am aware of who uses this technique as exactly and successfully as Moran is Steve Reich. And with the Schumann, Moran puts himself into the company of other musicians of his generation (Brad Mehldau, Dave Douglas, and Don Byron), who consciously look to the Romantic composers for material.  This is fairly new in the history of jazz, yet intuitively satisfying.  The interest previous generations of jazz players had in Stravinsky and Debussy could be a bit strained, an appreciation of the music of those composers and perhaps an incorporation of some of the more superficial aspects of their art, but there never was a fruitful collaboration between the two worlds, beyond the occasional quote from The Rite of Spring or the impressionistic textures of Herbie Hancock's Maiden Voyage.

However, jazz and Romanticism are natural partners. Beyond the clearly Modern essence of jazz, its continual translating and remaking of the past, jazz is above all the music of pure, spontaneous personal expression. Jazz is the player's music, the soloist's music, and all the fiddling with structural elements is ultimately secondary to that moment when the soloist begins to blow. It is the music of sensation, emotion, often of borderline frenzy. It is Romantic music, in other words, and it's also the blues, and since the melding of the blues and more European styles and instruments (the saxophone) led to jazz, then it feels appropriate that jazz musicians would find valuable ideas in Schumann and Brahms. Moran stays mostly faithful to Schumann, retelling his own version of the song after the initial exposition, rather than using it as a foundation for something entirely of his own invention. But because it is Schumann, and because Moran is a modern musician with roots deep in the past, it sounds at home along with the rest of the set on the CD.

After establishing his past, present and future, Moran goes farther with Brahms, abetted by his extraordinary trio on Jason Moran Presents the Bandwagon [Blue Note 80917], recorded live at The Village Vanguard. This is as good as the classic piano trio setting gets in contemporary jazz. The level of musicianship and the interplay of listening and response among the members is as skilled as the finest jazz piano trios, like Bill Evans's with Paul Motian and Scott LaFaro, or Cecil Taylor's contemporary Feel Trio. And they sound like they are having a great deal of fun! One of the highlights of this set is a beautiful, powerful arrangement of Brahms's Intermezzo, Op. 118, No. 2. Beginning with a more open take on the material than the Schumann, then joined in progress by Tarus Mateen on bass and Nasheet Waits on drums, Moran uses Brahms's exquisite cadence as a large-scale ostinato that supports an intense bass solo. The great strength again is how appropriate and natural the music sounds in the jazz context, how one must listen carefully to realize this is not just some richly harmonized standard tune used as a vehicle for improvisation. In Moran's hands, the musical and emotional spontaneity of Schumann and Brahms, their expressions of human experience, sound like jazz, not just something "jazzy."

The live recording continues Moran's work with music and speech: two of the tracks are explicitly built around musical accompaniment to recorded speech, with the pitch, syllables and rhythms of the voice translated to the keyboard. The result is some exciting ensemble playing, but a bit abstract and occasionally awkward musically, with lots of starting and stopping and a note palette severely constrained by the limited pitch range of the voices. Adding to the sense of abstraction and experimentation is that the two voices are both speaking foreign languages, one Turkish, the other Chinese, that are largely incomprehensible to the average listener. Part of the musical puzzlement is simply wondering what is being said.

Then, after a muscular modern look at the blues, Same Mother [Blue Note 71780], which adds guitarist Marvin Sewell to The Bandwagon, it all comes together with Artist in Residence. The recording features great music that has been carefully assembled to make a powerful whole with the type of internal structure that classical music is better known for providing, the sense of a relationship between pieces that make each one more satisfying as it is heard in a larger context. In the liner notes, Moran discusses how he purposefully mixed the order of the contents, originally three different commissioned pieces, into a whole that must be very different from the originals. This is so well done, however, that the results sound like sets of music that have been created together specifically for the recording.

Recorded speech is featured again, and Moran has really polished his handiwork here. As part of one commission, he takes a brief statement from the artist Adrian Piper and breaks it out into two different pieces: "Break Down" takes its title from the repetition of those same words, while "Artists Ought to Be Writing" is the complete material from which the first track derives. In each case, Moran's material is much more musical than his earlier attempts, both in melody and rhythm, and the added comprehensibility of the spoken text in English means these works literally have something to say, beyond being wonderfully driving, funky, bluesy music played by The Bandwagon. The Piper tracks are bookends for the sequence MILESTONE, which adds two other pieces, a ballad of the same title sung by Moran's wife Alicia Hall Moran in a truly lovely soprano voice and the "Cradle Song" lullaby by Carl Maria von Weber. It's "Milestone" that's actually the more Romantic of the two and it is an impressive, stand-out piece: not a stab at popular standard song form, it is a ballad in three-quarter time with a melody that makes a tour of the harmony before finally arriving at the tonic.  This is a lied, not a standard, with lyrics that put it more in the tradition of Frauenliebe und Leben than the Gershwins, and then it is something else again when it turns into a roiling trio improvisation. Interpolated amongst all this, and making a real set are two versions of a Moran original called "Refraction," the first a dark and funky vamp for the group, the second a quiet and searching exploration. Intentionally or not, all these different tracks have a rough key relationship cycling between D-flat, B-flat and E-flat, with well-judged alternation between minor and major keys, and they complete a natural suite.

The "Refraction" versions come from a commission that is completed in a second set of pieces. While the larger work is a collaboration with Joan Jonas titled The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things, Moran's new sequence begins and ends with what remains of it, the solos "Arizona Landscape" and "He puts on his coat and leaves." He inserts an ensemble piece that adds percussion and trumpet, another commission titled "RAIN," then segues into a rousing performance of the spiritual "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing." The effect is of hearing a large-scale work for dance. The opening solo is a relaxed Western style boogie-woogie, "RAIN" is based on an African-American slave culture dance and conveys a ritualistic quality with its gradually building intensity, and the spiritual "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing" (the unofficial Negro National Anthem) is reminiscent of Mahalia Jackson singing "Come Sunday" with Duke Ellington. If the first part of the record is a persuasive argument for contemporary jazz as a new Romanticism, the second part is an equally effective demonstration of the centrality of African-American slavery to American culture and of jazz as the very best expression of that culture. If the first part of the record is fruitfully experimental and modern, the second part is proudly, roughly American. And even with deep roots sunk in the blues and Romanticism, this is clearly fresh, modern music that can look to the future because it acknowledges the past. There is something exhilarating about this, hearing something that speaks to where the music, and we listeners, come from, where we are and where we are going all at once, like the thrill of hearing the quotations Berio uses in Sinfonia.

This is all inherent in Moran's style, and his playing is impossible to understand without the influence of his teacher. Jaki Byard was a great new traditionalist, straddling stride piano and blues and free playing most prominently in Charles Mingus's band, which allows us to draw a line from Mingus to Moran, and it should be drawn. Mingus was a conscious proponent of the traditional aspects of jazz and African-American musical roots, refracted through the unique combination of elegance and wildness that Ellington created. Mingus made music that was absolutely modern and in the moment, and he did so by acknowledging the centrality and the vitality of the tradition. Byard was his greatest piano player, and Byard has apparently passed along much of these ideas to Moran. Its not that Jason Moran ignores the history of jazz between stride and free, it's that what is most central to his expression is the roots of the music in the blues and early popular piano playing, with his added touch of Romanticism. He is a rousing piano player in the tradition of American charismatic religious services, keeping the very human spirits of the past alive. He plays "Planet Rock" with sincerity because the funk of hip-hop is impossible without the jump of stride. And his style and sound are rich and pianistic because the blues, the ache of life, were just as much in Schumann and Brahms as Charlie Patton. He understands all these languages and thankfully translates them for us.