March 2005  Jason Moran Same Mother Blue Note Records   Like any
two half-brothers, jazz and blues are bound by family and
divided by rivalry, and the temptation is to paper over those
complications by telling one lie (they have nothing in common)
or by telling another (they have everything in common). Moran
resists that temptation on his new disc, which works the
boundary line where the similarities and differences bump up
against one another.  Johanna Goodman  Jason Moran  When Moran
crafted a jazz improvisation based on a tape of a woman reading
a Chinese stock report, as he did on 2003's Bandwagon, he didn't
replicate spoken Chinese and he didn't use the tape as a mere
embellishment to a conventional jazz tune. He used the tape's
sound and feel as the starting point for his own harmonic,
rhythmic and melodic creations. On Same Mother he does the same
thing with the blues.  What he yanks out of the blues is not the
handful of gimmicks that most people pull-a 12-bar form, a sassy
sexuality, a guitar lick, a