Meanwhile, the Jazz Composers Collective dissolved in 2005, essentially a victim of its own success. All its members now have busy solo careers. Nash himself has issued four albums since Rhyme & Reason, while maintaining his full-time commitment to Jazz at Lincoln Center.
Portrait in Seven Shades stretched that into an overtime commitment, as Nash became absorbed with its concept and scope. The presentation will be visual as well as musical, thanks to slide projections and a lighting design coordinated by an outside director. During a recent MoMA walk-through, Nash pointed out aspects of specific paintings as he discussed the suite's seven movements, each inspired by a different artist.
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, as it turned out, inspired an exploration of the structural aspects of Cubism. Starting with the idea that each plane of a cube has four sides, Nash imbued his Picasso with four tonal centers, though its root is the standard flamenco key, E.
"Once we set up the Spanish feeling, it goes into this development of thematic material that is layered in fourths," Nash said, describing a harmonic interval.
Other sections were less formally constructed. Matisse proceeded from Nash's personal association of Matisse's late-career style with the "playful quality" of Thelonious Monk's music. Dali, conceptually prodded by the melted clocks in Salvador Dali's Persistence of Memory, employs a warped-sounding, asymmetrical time signature. Van Gogh was as informed by that painter's tormented life as by the "very tranquil" composition of Starry Nights. (The song, which is also Nash's first foray into lyrics, features a vocal by Yola Nash, his wife.)
Chagall paintings like I and the Village nudged Nash toward a chamber piece for several guests: the violinist Mark O'Connor, the accordionist Bill Schimmel and the trombonist Wycliffe Gordon. The instrumentation closely echoes that of Odeon, a band that Nash has featured on two acclaimed albums. It is perhaps the clearest instance of his outside interests entering the Jazz at Lincoln Center nexus, though there have been fleeting points of intersection. (Gordon, for one, is an alumnus of both bands.)
Late last month, during the first rehearsal of Nash's new music at Rose Hall, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra breezed through Monet, a springlike waltz that called pastels to mind. Then it struggled with Picasso, parts of which had been poorly transcribed. But even in rough shape, Nash's Cubist exercise packed a punch.
"I love being able to push them," he said of the band a few days later, at home on the Upper West Side. He was listening to a rehearsal tape of Pollock, which calls for an Abstract Expressionist scrabble, swinging but atonal, among the orchestra's horn section.
Nash was done tinkering with his charts and looking forward to the concert. He was also beginning to think about a private commission he has received to compose a suite based on the seven chakras of the human body. Not that he is loosening his focus on Jazz at Lincoln Center.
"More and more," he said, "I understand that I have an opportunity, and even a responsibility, to bring more of myself to this organization."
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