Kelly Moran’s Starting XI

The fantasy team of artists who’ve meant the most to pianist, composer and producer Kelly Moran throughout her life and career

A music venue shortly before an artist plays is rarely a good time and place to meet someone for an interview because venues stink and there never seems to be a single chair around. Dalston’s Cafe Oto – the London independent venue dedicated to free improvisation and avant-garde performance, famously thanked in Daniel Blumberg’s 2025 Oscar acceptance speech – is different in all ways, including this. It’s chairs galore as final rows are being positioned around three sides of a grand piano. Shortly after I arrive Kelly Moran steps in from the torrential rain with the positive energy of a heatwave. If she ever was nervous about performing solo piano recitals it more or less left her sometime between 2012 and 2018, when, on returning to New York from music college (Michigan) and grad school (California) she became a ballet school pianist, playing for 3- to 40-year-olds, slipping in prog-rock songs to unknowing students of the plié and rond de jambe.

Moran would make an excellent teacher …