One morning in July, the saxophonist Ted Nash took a stroll through the fourth- and fifth-floor galleries at the Museum of Modern Art. It was a visit studded with small realizations, in the placid hour before crowds arrive. Ann Temkin, MoMA's curator of painting and sculpture, was there to answer questions, of which Nash had a few.
He also had his own ideas. At one point he compared the relationship between Picasso and Braque, pioneers of Cubism, to the one between the saxophonists Charlie Parker and Sonny Stitt, paragons of bebop. At Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon, he paused.
"This is a famous image too," he said, to which Temkin replied: "This is like our Mona Lisa." Nash took a digital photograph. He had just seen Picasso's house in Malaga by accident, he said, during a tour of Basque Spain with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.
Seven months and many museum trips later, Nash is preparing for the premiere of his Portrait in Seven Shades, a suite inspired by pieces from MoMA's collection.
"There are so many parallels between the two art forms," Nash said in an interview at the museum, standing in front of Les Demoiselles again.
"But the end result of the art is so different," he added. "A painting exists forever, exactly how it is, and with jazz music, it changes all the time. I love the idea that in the concert, we're going to have both things simultaneously: a fixed piece of art that doesn't change combined with something that's going to be changing."
He could almost have been talking about his role in the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, which has changed subtly but considerably since its director, Wynton Marsalis, invited him aboard a decade ago.
Nash, 47, came to the band with a wellspring of jazz experience. He grew up in Los Angeles, where his father, the trombonist Dick Nash, and his namesake uncle, a saxophonist, nurtured his prodigious talent. Starting at 16, he held down jobs with a succession of first-rate big bands, including, notably, after he moved to New York, the Mel Lewis Orchestra. Nash also was a prominent member of the Jazz Composers Collective, a confab dedicated to fostering original music, and the Herbie Nichols Project, its best-known ensemble (oddly enough, a repertory band).
Jazz at Lincoln Center presented an adjustment. "I felt a little bit out of place at the beginning," Nash said.
It didn't take long for Nash to lay claim to what Marsalis calls "the wildcard chair" in the band.
"He plays, on a virtuosic level, all of the reed instruments," Marsalis said. "He plays them all perfectly in tune, and he has a personality on each one that's different. And he can read music unbelievably well."
For a time, though, Nash maintained a kind of dual citizenship: he was playing more historical material at Jazz at Lincoln Center and more new music with the collective. In 1999, he made a breakthrough album, Rhyme & Reason (Arabesque), for a jazz quartet and strings.
"That was really the first hint of what a great arranger he is, in addition to being a composer," said the pianist and collective member Frank Kimbrough, who played on the album. (Marsalis sat in on two tracks.)
In some ways the Jazz and Art commission sheds light on a different era. Jazz at Lincoln Center has featured more new music every year, and not just from Marsalis. At the same time, its institutional influence has grown, so that it makes perfect sense for MoMA, whose board of trustees includes Marsalis, to provide such broad access to Nash.
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