Between the piano lid, his voluminous 1920s hoodlum-style hat and his stooped pose at the keyboard, there was not a lot of Jason Moran to be seen from the back seats. But there was certainly a lot to be heard from this 28-year-old Houston-born virtuoso.
Like Brad Mehldau, Moran often quotes the classics - but will also actually play a Strauss or Schumann piece. Unaccompanied performance seems a natural setting for Moran, who sweeps across many styles and traditions and is freer to do so in his own time and space with nobody else pulling at his sleeve.
The hat turned out to be not just an affectation or a defence against the climate. Moran was metaphorically tipping it to the 1920s stride and boogie-woogie master James P Johnson, and a jazz era when you couldn't move for musicians wearing fedoras indoors. But, unlike so many of this immensely satisfying young pianist's history-revisiting contemporaries, Johnson's music was not played straight, but with a backdrop of banging, free-jazz dissonant chords and abstract skiddy fills between the familiar high-stepping accents of stride piano.
The James P Johnson episode followed a loose-improv reverie against chattering voices on a backing tape, and Moran used the device later on in improvising against recorded conversations of his grandparents. The pianist's sense of the past is organic and active and rather than passive and overawed, a dynamism that was also apparent in two formidable dedications to his teachers, Muhal Richard Abrams and Jaki Byard. A Brahms Intermezzo developed in Mehldau-like manner with arrhythmic figures against an ostinato, while Moran's signature percussive rat-tat-tat on a single note mingled with swarming runs and thumping bass chords on the Abrams dedication. Moran elected to be at his least percussive on his visit to Thelonious Monk, raining streams of upper-register melody over a ponderous, almost funereal left hand. A young piano giant, who sounds as if he holds as much in reserve as the encyclopedia of jazz piano he actually lets you in on.
