If you want to understand what makes Jason Moran tick, start with the fact that he studied with Jaki Byard, a pianist who could play ragtime and free jazz in the same set without blinking. That lesson stuck. Moran never bought into the idea that jazz history is a straight line from Dixieland to the avant-garde — for him it's all just material, sitting there to be picked up, bent, and reassembled. He'll drop a stride lick into a Björk cover, or slow down a James Reese Europe recording until it sounds like ambient music. It shouldn't work as often as it does.

The backbone of his career is the trio he calls the Bandwagon, with Tarus Mateen on bass and Nasheet Waits on drums. These guys have played together so long they communicate in half-gestures — tempo shifts that would trip up most rhythm sections barely register as a ripple here. Albums like The Bandwagon (2003) and Same Mother (2005) show the group at its loosest, folding blues, funk, and free improvisation into the same breath. On Modernistic (2002), recorded mostly solo, Moran took on Afrika Bambaataa's 'Planet Rock' and made it sound like it had always belonged on a piano.

He's also one of the few jazz musicians who treats the recording studio and the art gallery as basically the same room. He's scored silent films, built a piece around a recording of his mother leaving him a phone message, and worked with visual artists including Kara Walker and Adrian Piper on gallery installations where the piano is as much sculpture as instrument. His tribute to Thelonious Monk, In My Mind: Monk at Town Hall, 1959 (2009), isn't a note-for-note recreation — it's Moran thinking out loud about what that night meant, mixing archival tape with his own playing until the past and present blur together.

None of this comes off as gimmicky, which is the hard part. A lesser musician mixing hip-hop breaks with stride piano would sound like a novelty act. Moran makes it sound inevitable, like he's just following the logic of the keyboard wherever it leads. Since 2011 he's also run jazz programming at the Kennedy Center, which tells you something about how the broader institutional world has come to see him — not as an outsider experimenting at the margins, but as someone trusted to shape how the music gets presented to everyone else.