At the Kennedy Center, a concert honors the 2025 NEA Jazz Masters amidst turbulence

Jason Moran opened the 2025 NEA Jazz Masters Tribute Concert on Saturday night without pomp or preamble. Walking onstage before a nervously expectant audience at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., where he serves as the Artistic Director for Jazz, he sat at a Steinway grand and plunged into the bedrock stride piano standard “Carolina Shout,” composed by James P. Johnson more than a century ago. Moran was reminiscing in tempo, but also pursuing an unruly splendor: His busy hands shook loose an unpredictable jostle of tonal effects, from spiky to silky to stuttering.

In his welcoming remarks a moment later, Moran offered praise for the evening’s inductees: saxophonist Marshall Allen, pianists Chucho Valdés and Marilyn Crispell, and critic Gary Giddins. But he also shared a brief aside on bending time. “The concept within the term ‘syncopation,’ I think, is our greatest metaphor,” Moran said. “The music is inherently about the future: disrupting the everyday rhythm, pushing the anticipation of the oncoming beat.”

This poetic framing carried layers of meaning, like so much else in the concert, at a moment when both institutions behind it are facing an uncertain future. The National Endowment for the Arts, which has administered the NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship since 1982, is one of an array of federal programs whose oncoming beat has become difficult to anticipate under the Trump administration. Days before the inauguration, the endowment’s chair, Maria Rosario Jackson, announced her departure; a successor has yet to be announced. The director of music and opera at the NEA for the last decade, Ann Meier Baker, is also stepping down; her retirement makes this NEA Jazz Masters cycle the last under her stewardship.

This was the seventh time the NEA Jazz Masters celebration has been held at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which President Trump took over as chair earlier this year, stocking its board with supporters and ousting its long-running president. A directive to target diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives led to the dissolution of the Center’s Social Impact team, while layoffs and resignations have decimated other departments. The Center’s interim president, Richard Grenell, has clashed with artists, drawing partisan battle lines.

Jazz is nonpartisan, and there were no traces of overt political commentary in the concert. But one prevailing theme was the art form’s foundation in freedom, and its push to transcendence. Crispell provided a powerful illustration in her performance. Opening with a spontaneous solo prelude bristling with dissonance, she gradually settled into a pastoral drone with bassist Reggie Workman, one of her mentors (and a 2020 NEA Jazz Master himself). The song was John Coltrane’s “Dear Lord,” a hymn of devotion, and within Crispell’s pearlescent tremolos, flowing in a respiratory cadence, there was a gorgeous air of supplication.

During a tribute to Giddins, recipient of the 2025 A.B. Spellman NEA Jazz Masters Award for Jazz Advocacy, tenor saxophonist David Murray created an earthier, growlier version of this searching spirit. He led a version of his quartet through a mid-tempo original from their fine new album, as well as an impressionistic ballad by Billy Strayhorn, “Chelsea Bridge.” In Murray’s tenor solos, gruff bravado met with supple phrasing, often reaching beyond a standard sound palette toward smeary or keening expressionism.

As an advocate and historian, Giddins made his speech an argument for jazz’s essential value, and its lessons for civil society. He mentioned a line attributed to Duke Ellington, that “jazz is a barometer of freedom.” As Giddins explained, the phrase comes from an essay Ellington wrote in 1957, when asked to comment on the launch of the Soviet Sputnik satellite. Noting that ’57 was also the year of the Little Rock Nine and a standoff over desegregation, Giddins quoted from that essay:

To attain harmony, the notes are blended in such a fashion that there is no room for discord. In America, we simply don’t have this all-essential harmony. We don’t have it in politics, we don’t have it in our social life, nor in the (free) daily business of living.

Giddins quoted this passage almost verbatim, omitting only the phrase that mentions politics. (Ellington’s essay, which went unpublished at the time, was eventually collected in A Duke Ellington Reader.) But Giddins wasn’t glossing over a political critique: “He went on to excoriate hypocrisy in religion and government,” he said of Ellington.

“My interpretation,” Giddins said, “is that Ellington believed that the freedom inherent in creating jazz should be an example for the culture and the country to follow.”

He then pivoted to a related flourish from Ellington’s eulogy for Strayhorn, his longtime collaborator. “Strayhorn, Ellington wrote, ‘lived in what we consider the most important moral freedoms. Freedom from hate, unconditionally. Freedom from all self-pity. Freedom from fear of possibly doing something that might help another more than it would help you. And freedom from the kind of pride that could make a man feel he was better than his brother or neighbor.'”

This vision of freedom was vividly embodied, if not articulated outright, by two other members of the 2025 NEA Jazz Masters class. Valdés, who has devoted his life to an articulate convergence of musical dialects in his native Cuba, performed a pair of originals with his Royal Quartet, beginning with a sparkling solo introduction that achieved a note of Dukish elegance. His second tune, “Ponle La Clave (Put The Time On It),” skittered forward in a jetstream 14/8 meter, sounding joyous and free within a complex form.

Marshall Allen, this year’s oldest honoree, embodied a more thoroughly radical strain of freedom in a performance by the Sun Ra Arkestra. Now a few weeks shy of his 101st birthday, Allen made his alto saxophone into an engine of abstraction, voicing his trademark squawks and serrated cries. The Arkestra, which he joined in the mid-1950s and has led since the early ’90s, supported his wild sonic transmissions with a grooving, tuneful air, refulgent under the stage lights in a glorious array of sequinned capes and tunics.

Sun Ra, the band’s namesake and enduring inspiration, was one of three artists in the inaugural NEA Jazz Masters class. His earthly journey began in Birmingham, Ala. during the height of Jim Crow segregation, in 1914. Marshall Allen was born in Louisville, Ky. a decade later, coming of age in the generation that fought in World War II: He joined the 92nd Infantry Division, known as the Buffalo Soldiers, and was in the military band that performed at the V-E parade in Reims, France, with President Eisenhower on hand.

Allen said little at the podium, entrusting his acceptance speech to an associate. But he did quote a lyric and mantra by Sun Ra: “If we came from nowhere here / Why can’t we go somewhere there?” The mischief glinting in his eye was a token of resourceful resilience, hinting at a creative life that has always adhered to alternative modes, and tilted toward the future.

Allen’s beaming visage made it clear that he welcomed his accolades. But he also seemed to be keeping things in perspective: Compared to the eternal verities of the music, the glow of prestige, not to mention the fretful air of precarity, was neither here nor there.