It’s a little ironic that pianist Darrell Grant is receiving the 2019 Portland Jazz Master at the PDX Jazz Festival. For while the jazz he’s played since arriving in 1996 certainly merits the city’s highest jazz honor, Grant has devoted much of his life here to breaking out of the narrow mold of “jazz musician.”

Improvising a multifaceted career as teacher, mentor, activist, composer — and yes, jazz artist — Grant may be Portland’s most significant man of music.

“Darrell is a supremely gifted communicator across all media platforms, a gifted composer, educator and improviser, and an accomplished tennis player,” says PDX Jazz’s artistic director, Don Lucoff. “He embodies all that our Jazz Master lineage represents, a relentless searcher and action-oriented role model for our community to absorb and celebrate.”

Grant’s festival concert Feb. 28 allows him to complete a circle by revisiting the music that put him on the jazz map a quarter-century ago.

Growing up in Denver in the 1960s and ‘70s, Grant started classical piano lessons at age 7. Even then, he pushed against prescribed constraints, noodling improvised melodies while his elementary school band’s other pianist played the specified chords. Enchanted by classic jazz pianists from Nat Cole to Herbie Hancock, he joined a teenage all-star jazz band, won a scholarship to the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, at age 17, then earned a master’s degree at University of Miami.

He headed to New York City and quickly rose in the city’s revitalized, competitive jazz scene, landing plum sideman gigs with famed singer Betty Carter and legendary drummer Tony Williams‘ quintet. In 1989, he recorded his major-label debut with the jazz-fusion group Current Events, and then came his big breakthrough: “Black Art.” Named one of 1994’s top 10 jazz albums by The New York Times, it helped propel the Darrell Grant Quartet to jazz stardom while its leader was still in his early 30s.

But as he’d done with those classical tunes as a child, Grant couldn’t stay on the prescribed path. When an unsolicited job offer to succeed the storied jazz pianist Andrew Hill on Portland State University’s music faculty unexpectedly arrived in 1996, Grant seized it.

“I was looking for the opportunity to re-invent myself outside of the customary expectations of what a jazz musician does,” he told writer Willard Jenkins in 2016. “Living in Portland has provided me the opportunity to explore different ways of thinking about my role as an artist.”

Leaving New York City freed him to follow his own path and to define success by standards other than record sales and gigs. Along with teaching, Grant became an entrepreneur, curating a couple of jazz venues, starting the label Lair Hill Records, and performing with his own bands and with touring national jazz stars. He’s a member of the Jazz Society of Oregon Hall of Fame and has received, among other prizes, a Northwest Regional Emmy Award for his score for Oregon Public Broadcasting’s special “Jazz Town.”

Grant always turns his personal achievements into ways of benefiting his community. In 23 years and counting at Portland State, he’s taught every jazz class in the curriculum, created new courses, mentored a raft of students who now populate the city’s — and the country’s — jazz stages, and in 2002 founded the school’s Leroy Vinnegar Jazz Institute to preserve and promote the art form, cultural heritage and social history of Northwest jazz.

“I don’t want to make music for myself,” he told soulandjazz.com. “I want to make music that helps other people.”

He’s encouraged his students to follow their own thoughtfully improvised paths, whether into musical mastery or other arenas. The Artist as Citizen course he recently co-created at Portland State trains students in the social engagement aspect of their art.

“You take up practices like jazz to find deeper things within yourself, and then use them in a variety of ways,” he explains. “How do you define your mission and understand your sense of agency? That’s what allows young musicians to look at the landscape they’re facing and use their skills and abilities to enter those arenas and make change.”

Grant has plenty of experience doing just that. Proceeds from his recordings and concerts have benefited Mercy Corps, Portland Children’s Museum and the Oregon Historical Society, among other nonprofits. In 2017, he hauled a piano to the Elliott State Forest in Oregon’s Coast Range and played a concert to protest a proposal to privatize the land.

“The Elliot forest (performance) was an experiment: By taking an action, how many ripples can you create?” he says. “There’s a continuum of ways in which artists can engage,” he says. Take his piece “Step by Step: The Ruby Bridges Suite,” which was performed recently by a multiracial choir in Nashville. Composed in 2012 for Reed College’s centennial, the multi-movement work was inspired by the first African American child to attend an all-white public elementary school in the American South and includes other civil rights era writings. It’s been performed throughout the country and returns to Portland this summer.

Grant continues to create socially engaged art. "Sanctuaries," his chamber opera coming next year with Third Angle New Music and slam poet/librettist Anis Mojgani, explores gentrification and the displacement of residents of color in Portland's historically African America Albina district.

Another upcoming project, premiering in May, is "21 Cartas," a collaborative song cycle with singer/songwriter Edna Vazquez based on letters written by 21 immigrant women incarcerated in Texas with their children.

Those non-jazz compositions, following Grant’s landmark 2012 chamber orchestra composition about Oregon history, “The Territory,” reflect another way he’s improvised his career away from defined paths of jazz or academia. A vice president of the national organization Chamber Music America, Grant is increasingly expanding his musical creativity.

“You say ‘opera,’ and improv and jazz aren’t the first words that come to mind,” he says, laughing. “Composition has allowed me space to claim my own voice in this other world. I can bring my own voice and experience. As a jazz artist I don’t have to go with the prescribed way of highlighting improvisation, and as a composer I don’t have to go with the prescribed way of having everything written — I can remain an improviser.”

Not that he’s left jazz behind. Grant’s MJ New Quartet, featuring four of Portland’s finest jazz bandleader/musicians, pays tribute to the esteemed Modern Jazz Quartet, which in the 1950s through the ‘70s pioneered chamber jazz.“ What appeals to me most now is the way in which they blended the aesthetics of classical chamber music and jazz and allowed them to cross pollinate,” Grant says. His group plays everything from Modern Jazz Quartet classics to Bach to Beethoven to Brazilian composer Antonio Carlos Jobim.

Non-jazz influences also color Grant’s All 4 Naught trio, which jazzifies contemporary singer-songwriters from Lorde and Pharrell Williams to Sting and James Taylor, rather than relying, as so much of today’s jazz does, on well-trodden mid-century standards. The other two members are former students of Grant’s, and they’re joining him in revisiting “Black Art” in his PDX Jazz Festival showcase.

“They’ve been my go-to rhythm section, but we’ve never played my old New York music,” Grant says.

“It’s kind of cool to go full circle.”

Terence Blanchard E-Collective & 2019 Portland Jazz Master Darrell Grant

When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 28.

Where: Revolution Hall, 1300 S.E. Stark St.

Tickets: $29.50-$49.50, pdxjazz.com or 877-435-9849.