Channeling Miles Davis
Stan Douglas · Stan Douglas · Jason Moran
Stan Douglas picks up where Miles Davis left off by creating the epic six-hour video Luanda-Kinshasa (2013). Inspired by his experience making pause button mixtapes in the early 1980s, Douglas imagined a recording that combined elements of Davis’s last studio album from the 1970s, On the Corner, with Manu Dibango-inspired Afrobeat. “This is a very tenuous connection between two things,” admits Douglas, but through polyphony he opens up history to alternate possibilities.
Featured artists
About the artists
Stan Douglas reenacts historical moments of tension, connecting local histories to broader social movements of struggle and utopian aspiration. In the artist’s intricate works, time and place fold back onto themselves to create a parallax of both vision and narrative: multiple moments in history and geography are experienced by the viewer simultaneously and reconciled into a new story. Working at the forefront of new media technologies, Douglas’s works have taken the form of mobile apps, virtual reality simulations, live cinema, theatrical productions, and multi-channel video installations where the narrative alters continuously through recombinant editing software.
An innovative and genre-crossing pianist, composer, and bandleader, Jason Moran has a venerable career as a recording and performing musician, marrying classical, blues, and jazz with hip-hop, funk, and rock in ways that continually expand genre boundaries. Moran has collaborated with jazz masters such as Charles Lloyd, Bill Frisell, and the late Sam Rivers, as well as the drummer Nasheet Waits and the bassist Tarus Mateen in the trio, The Bandwagon. Moran also collaborates extensively with a broad range of visual artists, including Adrian Piper, Joan Jonas, Glenn Ligon, Stan Douglas, Adam Pendleton, Lorna Simpson, Kara Walker, and Julie Mehretu.
With music, inspiration from visual art could take the form of thinking about space—space in music is important—when to have it, when to use it up. This 12-video playlist by indie rock legend Mac McCaughan presents artists who incorporate music in their practice.
