Jason Moran To Perform His Live Score Of Ava Duvernay's SELMA At The Soraya

Director Ava DuVernay's Selma tells the story of the events leading up to Dr. Martin Luther King's landmark 1965 march for voting rights - an event that forever changed history. In honor of Dr. King's birthday and Black History Month, The Soraya will screen Selma on the large screen - with its score performed live by its composer, acclaimed jazz pianist Jason Moran - artistic director of Jazz at the Kennedy Center - with the New West Symphony conducted by Cheche Alara on Saturday, February 1 at 8:00pm at The Soraya.

Film Music Magazine noted about Moran's astonishing first feature film score, "It's an unstoppable sense of history-making that could perhaps only be captured by a musician so steeped in jazz and its cultural heritage."

Tickets for Selma with Live Score by Jason Moran start at $36 and are currently on sale at The Soraya, (818) 677-3000 and at TheSoraya.org.

Selma earned Golden Globe nominations for Best Film, Director, Actor, and song for "Glory" (by John Legend and Common, who also appeared in the film). "Glory" earned the Golden Globe and the Oscar for Best Original Song; additionally, the film established the career of actor David Oyelowo with his acclaimed portrayal of King.

DuVernay portrays the preternatural bravery and defiance of the 1965 Selma to Montgomery march for voting rights, a defining moment for the civil rights movement. Tapped to create a score for the 2014 film, Jason Moran captured the tension and drama surrounding the march, events that played out in public and frenetic behind-the-scenes negotiations at the highest level of government.

Crafting a striking orchestral work laced with the blues, Moran wrote themes that seemed to breathe with the film, somber, thoughtful, and redolent of the South. He and guitarist Marvin Sewell, a roots-to-avant-garde string wizard, accompany Selma offering an immersive experience of an inordinately powerful film.

A.O. Scott in The New York Times said, "Bold and bracingly self-assured ... Ms. DuVernay, in her third feature writes history with passionate clarity and blazing conviction. Selma is not a manifesto, a battle cry or a history lesson. It's a movie: warm, smart, generous and moving in two senses of the word. It will call forth tears of grief, anger, gratitude and hope. And like those pilgrims on the road to Montgomery, it does not rest."

Directed with passion and conviction by Ava DuVernay, written by Paul Webb, and starring a mesmerizing David Oyelowo, Selma relates one of the great American dramas: the tumultuous three-month period in 1965, when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led a dangerous campaign to secure equal voting rights in the South in the face of violent opposition. These epic marches led by James Bevel, Hosea Williams, Martin Luther King Jr., and John Lewis from Selma to Montgomery culminated in President Lyndon Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) signing the Voting Rights Act of 1965, one of the most significant victories for the civil rights movement. Other roles are played by Tim Roth as George Wallace, Carmen Ejogo as Coretta Scott King, and Common as Bevel.

Ava DuVernay has in short order has become one of the most important film makers of our time: for her second feature film Middle of Nowhere she won the 2012 Sundance Film Festival directing award (United States, drama), the the first black woman to win the award. With Selma (2014), DuVernay became the first black woman to be nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Director, and the first black female director to have her film nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award; her 13th (2017) was nominated for the Best Documentary Feature Academy Award.

With A Wrinkle in Time, she became the first black American woman to direct a film to earn $100 million domestically. The following year, she created, co-wrote, and directed the acclaimed Netflix miniseries "When They See Us", based on the 1989 Central Park jogger case.

David Denby in The New Yorker said, "Directed with passion and conviction by Ava DuVernay and starring a mesmerizing David Oyelowo as King, Selma relates one of the great American dramas, how events in and around a small Alabama city forced this country to live up to its democratic rhetoric and ensure the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. You can be grateful that this momentous chapter in American history has been filmed at last."

Chris Nashawaty in Entertainment Weekly said, "DuVernay has done a great service with Selma. Not only has she made one of the most powerful films of the year, she's given us a necessary reminder of what King did for this country...and how much is left to be done."

Richard Corliss in Time magazine said, "This is the film of the year - of 1965 - and perhaps of 2014."

Prefacing an interview with Moran, Daniel Schweiger wrote in Film Music Magazine: "In the civilly disobedient musical case of Martin Luther King Jr. the impact of Selma's score comes from its subtlety of meeting racist fury with soft dignity, as the jazz, soul and spiritual rhythms of an oppressed black nation join hands with a measured symphonic approach, especially when detailing the movement's effect on a troubled marriage through soft strings and piano. Yet this is also a soundtrack that truly knows when to raise its emotional fist to shattering orchestral effect - both in getting across King's still unmet call for racial equality, as well as announcing an impressive new voice on the major scoring scene.

As heard in an astonishing Hollywood debut by Jason Moran, Selma mixes the inspirationally expected with equal innovation, from paranoid electronics to the handclap percussion of police beat-downs. It's an unstoppable sense of history making that could perhaps only be captured by a musician so steeped in jazz and its cultural heritage."

Moran said, "Selma is a real comment on the relationships that rule the country, and how we relate to each other. There's an indictment it imposes on all of us, the moment where King is giving a eulogy for the child that was murdered. He kind of indicts everybody, the people who aren't a part of the marches. He indicts the clergy when he says, 'Come on y'all. You see this is a problem for people.' This film will hopefully serve as a template to show how the community that was around Martin Luther King Jr., and what we have to do now to move forward and progress. Not to just change laws, but to change peoples' attitudes.

It has that kind of tension and history built into it, a process of exploring sounds from James Brown to today's artists like John Legend and Common, who perform Selma's end song "Glory." So when I study jazz, I don't just study just the music. I study its relationship where it was in the history. Selma is set in the 60s, when John Coltrane was about to make his most profound work 'A Love Supreme,' which is about the way he felt about the things that were happening with the civil rights movement, as well as the four girls who were bombed in a church. John made a piece about that, so our relationship to each other has always been extremely close. It's daunting to think about that, but it's also how I've been working for my entire life as a creative artist."

A score can be of help, but it can also really strong-arm a theme. I didn't want to necessarily do that here. ... On Selma, I was trying to give just a little, because my habit as a jazz player is to actually give you a lot (laughs)! But I had to resist the temptation, because the score needs to be "felt" more than "heard." I was thinking of how the music would get us from place to place, and how it would help the audience breathe. And sometimes it needed to be big, to put us on a boat and take us across this bridge to arrive at Martin Luther King's final speech."

To post a comment, you must register and login.