Pianist, composer, and conceptual artist Jason Moran has spent a quarter century redrawing the boundaries of where jazz lives, from his eighteen-year run on Blue Note to museum exhibitions at the Whitney and Walker Art Center to scores for Selma and 13th.

A MacArthur Fellow and former Artistic Director for Jazz at the Kennedy Center, the Houston native has built landmark stage works around Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, and James Reese Europe, treating jazz history as living material rather than museum inventory. At the center of it all remains The Bandwagon, his trio with bassist Tarus Mateen and drummer Nasheet Waits, now more than 25 years deep and still among the most telepathic working units in the music.

For this project, Moran opens the circle to two of the most compelling voices of a rising generation: trumpeter Akili Bradley, who joined Moran during his recent artist residencies at Monterey and Detroit, and bassist and vocalist Devon Gates, a fast-emerging presence on New York and festival stages. The result puts the Bandwagon’s hard-won intuition in conversation with new energy, an intergenerational exchange that mirrors Moran’s own path from Jaki Byard student to standard-bearer.