We wish that we’d known about “713 to 212,” a jazz festival centered on musicians who studied at Houston’s High School for Performing and Visual Arts; we didn’t even know that the 92nd Street Y has a Tribeca branch!

Beginning at that time Jason Moran, the pianist from Houston’s Third Ward who’d moved to New York in 1993, was getting around all kinds of normative ideas about jazz style and repertory, but he didn’t isolate himself from the jazz tradition. He swiped inspiration from all over the place — visual art, film, the music of spoken conversation in foreign languages — but also played with Greg Osby and Sam Rivers and Charles Lloyd and Wayne Shorter. He was having it both ways. If asked what formed him, he’d talk about his teachers, and that would lead him to talk about Houston and the school he attended for three years there: the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts.

Then, in a steady rollout, you noticed other young musicians from that same school, most of whom had studied with the same teacher, Robert Morgan. The drummers Eric Harland, Kendrick Scott, Chris Dave and Jamire Williams. The trombonist Corey King. The guitarist Mike Moreno. The pianists Robert Glasper and Helen Sung. The trumpeters Leron Thomas and Brandon Lee. The bassists Burniss Earl Travis and Mark Kelley and Marcos Varela. If you looked a little beyond jazz, you saw Josh Mease and Alan Hampton, putting crazy chord sequences into something like folk-pop, and Bryan-Michael Cox, who was writing and producing for R&B stars.

All but one of them came to the 92nd Street Y’s TriBeCa branch on Friday and Saturday nights for an event organized by Mr. Moran called “713 to 212: Houstonians in NYC.” (The exception was Mr. Cox, scheduled to participate but unable to make it out of Atlanta in time.) Dr. Morgan, affable and energetic, was there too, talking in a preconcert panel discussion on Saturday. So were some Houston players of older generations: the tenor saxophonist Billy Harper, the trumpeter Ku-umba Frank Lacy, the drummer Michael Carvin, the trumpeter Tex Allen, the guitarist Melvin Sparks.

Our usual source for information of this kind has been very busy lately. For just over a year, in fact.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, January 17th, 2011 at 6:00 pm.