Jeff McCord

“Heady stuff.” If only by dropping references to painters Basquiat and Rauschenberg into his work, Houston-born jazz pianist JASON MORAN undoubtedly hears that a lot. His latest, ARTIST IN RESIDENCE (Blue Note), based on his compositions for three commissions in the past year—for Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center and New York’s Dia Art Foundation and Jazz at Lincoln Center—does little to dispel the notion. Snippets of artist Adrian Piper intoning her peers to “break down the barriers” between the…

Like Joe Ely, Jo Carol Pierce grew up in the dusty vacuum of Lubbock, and though she was part of the town’s famed clique of talent, only in her late forties did she begin to take her writing seriously. She penned and performed Bad Girls Upset by the Truth, an off-kilter musical monologue about a girl’s wry (and often hilarious) quest for spiritual enlightenment through a series of boys, and songs like “Loose Diamonds” and “I Blame God” revealed a remarkably perceptive genius. Pierce is among the…

Living in an age where the “genius” label is as common as pocket change leaves a breathtakingly original artist like Fort Worth’s ORNETTE COLEMAN out in the critical cold. Coleman calls his music—marked by brittle melody, propulsive rhythms, and a lack of sonic density—“harmolodics,” a term that doesn’t convey much to the uninitiated. But the 76-year-old finds no limits in language. SOUND GRAMMAR (Sound Grammar), Coleman’s first release in a decade, shows that a mere 26 letters, or in this case,…

Like his compatriot “outlaw” Willie Nelson, WAYLON JENNINGS had already done a lot of solid work in Music City before reaching his breaking point, one set off by an accumulation of road dates, divorces, unpaid bills, and pep pills. So NASHVILLE REBEL (RCA/Legacy), a beautifully annotated four-CD retrospective, is a bit of a misnomer: The Littlefield-born singer hadn’t come to town to stir things up. In truth, when Jennings finally took control and started making records on his terms in 1972, his…

High school band albums, which proliferate in every community that has a music program, are usually so tedious that even the parents who buy them can’t bear to listen. On awful recordings packed with bad tunings and missed cues, the student musicians muddle through some stock big-band arrangement about as interesting to them as they are to the washed-out musician conducting. Yet every so often, a teacher comes along who truly motivates kids, letting them play the music they love while surreptiti…

Only being born too late kept Booker Ervin from becoming one of the original Texas Tenors. No one embodied the braggadocio of the Texas jazz sound like the Denison native; he cut into each piece with his sawtoothed tone, improvising with ferocity. Unexplained is how Ervin, who soared during his years with bassist Charles Mingus and on his 1963 breakthrough, The Freedom Book, found his latter-day career stalled. Or how the newly reissued Tex Book Tenor (Blue Note), a post-bop powerhouse ’68 sessi…

Detractors of Dallas’s RED GARLAND disdained him as a “cocktail pianist” and claimed he made it into Miles Davis’s first classic quintet (from 1955 to 1957) only because of a stylistic similarity to Davis obsession Ahmad Jamal. Yet he proved the perfect accompanist for not just the legendary trumpeter but also, subsequently, Davis’s saxophonist John Coltrane. On a pair of superb collections, Davis’s four-CD THE LEGENDARY PRESTIGE QUINTET SESSIONS and COLTRANE’s SIX-CD FEARLESS LEADER (both Prest…

Trailblazing? Trend-mongering? Career ending? All three? Fans of the Bad Livers’ odd slant on bluegrass will debate the stylistic about-face of Blood & Mood. Heresies abound: reassembled drum tracks, samples, treated vocals, electric guitars, even synthesizers. But given the Bad Livers’ decade-plus history, it’s impressive that the band still possesses the capacity to surprise. The group’s early marathon sets in Austin bars were typical. A banjo-fiddle-standup bass trio, they played with menace,…

Austin chanteuse Patty Griffin is known for her deeply introspective music, yet her new album, Children Running Through (ATO), is joyous and fun.You seem to change moods from album to album. Are you easily bored? Yeah, I can’t stand the songs anymore [laughs]. You get exhausted on the road and you end up repeating the set, so it gets to feel a little slutty. In the years since the war started, I’ve looked out at the faces in the audience and felt like I needed to have more material of my own tha…

LUCINDA WILLIAMS’s music is evocative in a way others can’t touch. It’s not only the fragility and ache in her voice but also her economy of language, with its declarative simplicity that cuts to the heart. A perfect album is a rarity, yet Williams has made two, her 1988 self-titled breakthrough and 1998’s Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. Wheels’ five years of sessions were torturous for this onetime Austinite, as was a 2000 New Yorker profile that portrayed her as a perfectionist frozen by her inse…