At Fresh to Def, Eddie Moore brings the groove

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No one is listening to Eddie Moore play the piano. Not tonight, not at Sullivan’s Steakhouse in Leawood, where Moore has been playing nearly every Wednesday night for a year.

Matt Leifer, who accompanies him on drums, hears everything, but the bar is packed — professional types at high-tops, with martinis — and not a single head turns to pay attention to the men playing the music.

I recognize the notes of Tears for Fears’ “Mad World,” and the lyrics begin to form inside my head. Moore doesn’t present the song as a party killer — there’s a bit of bounce in his version, and it plays out with a graceful energy. When the song ends, I begin to clap, and I find I’m the only one. The sound of my applause is no match for the chatter of patrons and the clattering of plates being cleared. And then Moore and Leifer start another song.

Loud laughter comes naturally to Moore, but aside from the occasional twitch at the corner of his mouth, he’s a bit solemn at this night’s session.

The day before this set, at the Westport Coffeehouse, Moore told me how this night would go. In his casual, jovial way, he laid out the booking’s pros and cons.

“We all have those gigs where it’s low pressure, and you can mess around and no one’s really listening,” Moore says. “It’s like personal practice. You can be experimental. And there [at Sullivan’s], it’s OK because no one really notices. The only rule is that we don’t swing. They don’t want that. We literally just groove. We groove jazz standards, and no one knows.”

Throughout our conversation, Moore references this: the difference between “swinging” and “grooving.” At its most basic, Moore explains, “swinging” means playing the standards, and “grooving” means improvising. (He will later tell me that, technically, groove is a type of swing, and he will annotate this explanation with rhythmic sound effects, which the few other coffeehouse patrons politely ignore.) Grooving, Moore says, is looser — it’s more about a feeling. As a musician who grew up with one foot in hip-hop and the other in jazz, he is most interested in precisely this, this feeling.

“A lot of people think about jazz as a genre, and it has these certain characteristics, and a lot of people associate that with being classic,” Moore says. “But jazz isn’t a genre to me. It’s a freedom of expression. At its essence, it is the art of improvisation. That’s why it has so many variations — like free jazz and bebop and and post-bop and hip-hop-bop and big band and swing, all those.

“At the end of the day,” he adds, “they’re really just improvising. The feel and the concept are different musically, but they’re all improvising. You have to learn how to swing and go through all that to get a better idea of improvisation because that’s where that conversation starts. But it doesn’t stop there.”

Moore would know. He moved to Kansas City from Houston in 2010 to study at the University of Missouri–Kansas City Conservatory of Music and Dance, and since graduating with a master’s degree in 2012, he has plumped his résumé with an eclectic stack of experiences. He has accompanied Bobby Watson and played with psych-rock band Various Blonde, jazz group Book of Gaia, and reggae master Zack Mufasa.

His own quartet, the Outer Circle, is one of the most recognizable outfits in local jazz. The band’s most recent release, June’s Live in Kansas City (recorded at Green Lady Lounge), plays out like an elegant, funky adventure. There’s a lot of back-and-forth between melody and rhythm, a wide landscape of highs and lows.

Moore’s music often takes a shape similar to his conversational style. When you talk with him, his wiry energy is apparent, the push and pull of too many ideas in his head to come out all at once. Yet he’s resolutely calm, as though he knows he will get to them all eventually.

That’s where Fresh to Def comes in. For the past year, once a month at the Tank Room, Moore and the Outer Circle — usually with rapper Kemet Coleman — puts on an open-call hybrid jam session. The Outer Circle provides a live backdrop for local rappers, singers, lyricists and poets; Coleman gets things started and usually acts as moderator. The people joining him onstage, Moore says, don’t normally have the opportunity to flesh out their material with a full band.

“It’s been interesting because a lot of my friends are jazz guys, and a lot of Kemet’s friends are MCs, but those two communities are hardly ever in the same room together,” Moore says. “A lot of guys get to meet and play with each other that never would normally. The whole idea is to create on the spot, and we’re not necessarily trying to play tunes. Usually, we ask the MC what he wants to hear, and he’ll be like, ‘I wanna hear some funk,’ or whatever. And it goes from there. That’s it, working on the fly and communicating with these people that you might not know.”

Coleman, who also co-leads the R&B-and-funk group the Phantastics, has adopted Moore’s passion for improvisation because, he reminds me, that’s also what hip-hop is based on. And Fresh to Def, he says, makes it easy to contribute.

“There was nothing like this in Kansas City that was happening on a consistent basis,” Coleman says. “And Eddie, he can do what a lot of people can’t do because he’s got talent as a pianist, but he’s also got an incredible ear. He can marry jazz and hip-hop in a way that’s progressive and fresh. To see someone being able to do that, taking those static beats — loops, essentially — and turning them into an arrangement, that’s hard to find.”

But Moore doesn’t view his role in Fresh to Def as all that central to the experience.

“Fresh to Def is about creating a platform, regardless of where the musician is coming from,” he says, “to be able to create on the fly and improvise, to get in the realm of improvising without worrying about the other elements that come with it. It’s really about being able to not be self-conscious and just create.”

And, he adds, at Fresh to Def, there’s an element of watching something being created in real time. It’s an environment where everyone present is there to listen carefully because no one knows what note will come next.

It sounds risky. Moore laughs — a boisterous, merry sound — and rests his arm on the empty chair next to him. “I find it liberating.”