Jason Moran’s Staged: Improvisational Blurring and the Boundaries of Conceptual Art
Jason Moran’s Staged: Improvisational Blurring and the Boundaries of Conceptual Art

Summary/Abstract: I examine jazz pianist Jason Moran’s conceptual artwork, Staged (2015/18), in order to interrogate the intersection between improvisation and contemporary art. Enlisting and expanding upon George Lewis’s coinage and theorization of Afrological and Eurological practices, I outline discourses that have coded improvisation as embedded in tradition, the “known,” and history, and conceptual art (as a form of “contemporary art”) as free from these. Staged brings these discourses into collision and offers new directions for contemporary art through its jazz improvisatory sensibility.

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