Jackson Moore (b. 1976) is a composer and multi-instrumentalist living in New York. He became obsessed with the recorded history of jazz as a teenager and moved to Hartford at the age of seventeen to study with legendary saxophonist Jackie McLean. Soon after, he discovered a remarkable community of musical autodidacts in Middletown, Connecticut, an hour to the south. Within a year, he had decided to move to Middletown and dedicate himself to developing entirely new musical idioms.
In Middletown, Moore spearheaded several projects that re-examined the ways musicians think and communicate with one another, including the Middletown Three, the Correspondence Quartet, and the Middletown Creative Orchestra. He also began an intense apprenticeship with composer and multi-instrumentalist Anthony Braxton, touring with him for five years, collaborating on musical research, and making a significant contribution to Braxtonʼs discography. In 1999, Moore moved to New York City, and continued to pursue a career outside the conventional boundaries of the music industry.
In 2003, after spending years devising new resources for improvising musicians, Mooreʼs work took a fundamental turn as he shifted his focus from what the musician is thinking about to what the musician is not thinking about. He began to reexamine jazz, the idiom that he had tried to abandon at the age of 20, to better understand how the jazz solo articulates musical knowledge that we already have but are not yet conscious of. Approaching music as an essentially signifying medium rooted in unconscious cognitive faculties, he designed Moss, a referential contact language with a musical phonology, and began developing a body of formalized music based on linguistics and cognitive science.
In 2005, Moore and fellow saxophonist Aaron Ali Shaikh founded New Languages, a non-profit dedicated to creative music. They went on to produce a jazz festival for five years, in addition to many other special events. Since then, New Languages has become a vehicle to organize events that explore new conventions, sites, and time frames for live musical collaboration.
In addition to his compositional activities, Moore has taught extensively and has played a part in the free school movement, joining the organizing committee of The Public School, a non-accredited educational institution founded by Telic Arts, and participating in numerous experiments in collaborative self-education.
