In this Session, pianist and composer Jason Moran performs a contemporary jazz reinterpretation of the 1919 song “All of No Man’s Land Is Ours” inside Ellen Gallagher’s solo exhibition of the same title at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Composed by jazz pioneer James Reese Europe, who founded the regimental band the Harlem Hellfighters, with lyrics by Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle, the song recounts a soldier’s call home to his sweetheart. The track is from Moran’s latest album, "From the Dancehall to the Battlefield," in which he meditates on Europe’s life, music, and legacy, incorporating new sounds and strategies, such as “real-time remixing,” as he revisits the influential originals.
Likewise remixing processes of accretion, erasure, and extraction in her multilayered compositions, in the exhibition Gallagher juxtaposes six of her works with Paul Cezanne’s "Scipio" (1867), the Post-Impressionist painter’s only image of a Black subject. Combining oil paint, cut and carved rubber, crumpled notebook papers, and metal with imagery that delves into the depths of both history and the ocean, her paintings chart the liminal and mutable spaces of “no man’s land.”
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Artwork © Ellen Gallagher; "All of No Man's Land Is Ours," written by James Reese Europe, with lyrics by Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle, performed and reinterpreted by Jason Moran
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