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 role as artistic director for jazz at the Kennedy Center.

• Why Monk’s angular melodies and use of silence sounded like hip-hop to a teenager
• What separates stride piano from avant-garde jazz, and why Byard taught the whole lineage
• How In My Mind reimagined Monk’s 1959 Town Hall concert with archival tape and visual art
• The Fats Waller Dance Party and restoring jazz to its roots as popular dance music
• The 2010 sweep of the DownBeat critics’ polls and the MacArthur Fellowship