Turntable Roundtable with Jason Moran

Friday, February 27, 7pm
The Brick
518 N. Western Avenue
Free

Please join The Brick and Chicago gallery Corbett vs. Dempsey for this year's installment of Turntable Roundtable featuring distinguished pianist Jason Moran.  

Moran will perform two solo sets before being joined by an esteemed panel featuring artist Cauleen Smith and writer, critic, gallerist and all around music enthusiast John Corbett. Moran's practice is highly promiscuous, moving across styles, genres and disciplines as he is also an accomplished visual artist.  Although ground in jazz, his music traverses any and all boundaries. Join us for a lively discussion and listening session about jazz piano as panelist needle-drop tracks that are deep cuts, guilty pleasures and revelations.  

Jazz pianist, composer, and performance artist Jason Moran was born in Houston, TX in 1975 and earned a degree from the Manhattan School of Music, where he studied with Jaki Byard. Moran was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2010 and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022. He is the Curator at the Park Avenue Armory and was the Artistic Director for Jazz at The Kennedy Center from 2011-2025. Moran currently teaches at the New England Conservatory.

Moran is deeply invested in reassessing and complicating the relationship between music and language, and his extensive efforts in composition, improvisation, and performance are all geared towards challenging the status quo while respecting the accomplishments of his predecessors. His activity stretches beyond the many recordings and performances with masters of the form including Charles Lloyd, Bill Frisell, and the late Sam Rivers, and his work with his trio The Bandwagon (with drummer Nasheet Waits and bassist Tarus Mateen) has resulted in a profound discography for Blue Note Records. The scope of Moran’s partnerships and music-making with venerated and iconic visual artists is extensive. He has collaborated with such major figures as Adrian Piper, Joan Jonas, Glenn Ligon, Stan Douglas, Adam Pendleton, Lorna Simpson, and Kara Walker; commissioning institutions of Moran’s work include the Walker Art Center, the Philadelphia Art Museum, the Dia Art Foundation, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Harlem Stage, and Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Cauleen Smith (b. Riverside, CA, 1967) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work reflects upon the everyday possibilities of the imagination. Operating in multiple materials and arenas, Smith roots her work firmly within the discourse of mid-twentieth-century experimental film. Drawing from structuralism, third world cinema, and science fiction, she makes things that deploy the tactics of these disciplines while offering a phenomenological experience for spectators and participants. 

Her films, objects, and installations have been featured in group exhibitions including the Whitney Biennial (2017), Prospect 4, New Orleans (2017), Studio Museum Harlem; the Contemporary Art Museum Houston; the New Museum, New York; and BALTIC Center for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK. She has had solo exhibitions at MASS MoCA; the Art Institute of Chicago; Institute for Contemporary Art Pennsylvania; the Museum of Contemporary, Chicago; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and a two person exhibition with Theaster Gates at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Smith lives in Los Angeles and is a Professor at CalArts School of Art.

John Corbett is a writer, curator, and producer based in Chicago.  He is co-owner of Corbett vs. Dempsey, an art gallery. Corbett is the author of several books, including A Listener’s Guide to Free Improvisation (2016), Vinyl Freak: Love Letters to a Dying Medium (2017), and Pick Up the Pieces: Excursions in Seventies Music (2019).  As an essayist and reviewer, Corbett has written for numerous academic and commercial publications, including DownBeat, The Wire, The Chicago Reader, The Chicago Tribune, NKA, Bomb, LitHub, and Lapham’s Quarterly. Corbett’s work as a music producer includes his label, the Unheard Music Series, which existed from 1999-2006, and Corbett vs. Dempsey, an ongoing label issuing CDs of new and historical jazz, experimental music and improvised music. As a curator, Corbett has been involved in many exhibitions at museums including the Smart Museum of Art, the Tang Teaching Museum, Sullivan Galleries, the School of the Art Institute, Chicago, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia.  Corbett taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1988 to 2014.