Body/Head
Thinking the Unthinkable

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. Written by the influential jazz pioneer James Reese Europe, who founded the regimental band the Harlem Hellfighters, the lyrics recount 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, revisiting the originals while incorporating new sounds and strategies, including “real-time remixing.”

In this Session, blues poet, musician, and organizer aja monet performs with Weedie Braimah, Jeremiah Edwards, Craig Harris, Jehbreal Jackson, and Samora Pinderhughes inside the exhibition Amoako Boafo: what could possibly go wrong, if we tell it like it is at Gagosian, 980 Madison Avenue, New York. In a powerful exchange of spoken word and song, monet reads poetry that she composed in response to Boafo’s portraits, which blend themes of Black love, resistance, joy, and community building, while her musical collaborators perform a free-flowing new interpretation of Aaron Neville’s 1966 soul hit “Tell It Like It Is” on piano, bass, drums, trombone, didgeridoo, and djembe, with expressive vocals by Jackson. Pinderhughes and Braimah also worked with monet on her recently released debut album, When the Poems Do What They Do (2023), which was described by NPR’s Sheldon Pearce as “gorgeously meditative and potently groovy.”