A 13-year-old skateboarder in late-1980s Houston, obsessed with hip-hop and secretly trained in Suzuki-method classical piano since age six, hears Thelonious Monk's Round Midnight and realizes it sounds like a beat. This episode traces how Jason Moran grew from that moment into a MacArthur Fellow, drawing on a childhood in Pleasantville surrounded by his father's 10,000-album collection, family ties to painter John T. Biggers, and study at Houston's High School for the Performing and Visual Arts.

We follow him to the Manhattan School of Music and mentorship under Jaki Byard, the conversation that got him hired by Greg Osby without an audition, his Blue Note debut Soundtrack to Human Motion, and the formation of The Bandwagon with Tarus Mateen and Nasheet Waits. We also explore his multimedia projects, film scores for Selma and 13th, and his ...