Festival Music

Jason Moran: All Rise – A Joyful Elegy for Fats Waller

The Hub

FOUR STARS

Rob Adams

There’s a man standing at a Rhodes electric piano, wearing a mask over his head and jiggle-wiggling in time to the music. The singer is cajoling the audience from their seats and the drummer is encouraging a group of dancers to join him in his corner of the stage. The joint is, as the song goes, jumpin’. Not to quite the same rhythm that joints jumped to when Fats Waller arrived to play at rent parties in the 1920s but Jason Moran, a child of the 1970s, was hardly going to present a celebration of Waller’s music as if it were preserved in aspic.

For a time during Honeysuckle Rose, with its vaulting, irresistible bass guitar groove and confiding trumpet lines, it seemed as if Moran might have conflated his elegy to Waller with Miles Davis’ tribute to another African-American icon, heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson. That masterpiece came a mere thirty years after Waller’s death, though, and this celebration was of a much later time: now.

As well as making Waller skip to hip hop and emphatic beats from today’s streets, Moran brought out a seductive Latin American tinge on the opening number and emphasised the gospel influence, with singer Lisa Harris taking Tain’t Nobody’s Business if I Do, especially, to church with her moody, soulful hymning. Trumpeter Leron Thomas’s charmingly rogue-ish Two Sleepy People was the most conventionally Walleresque contribution but even in a digression into the recently departed Ornette Coleman’s Lonely Woman, Moran was drawing on the same traditions that fed into Waller’s music and reinvigorating them with larger-than-life keyboard energy.