There’s no question that interdisciplinary is a buzz word in contemporary circles. Even so, musical composition and charcoal drawing are still usually considered distant nodes on the creative continuum. Rarely does a single exhibition conflate both. Even rarer: a single artist who complicates conventional forms of object and sound. There are probably, in fact, only a handful of dynamic minds who can traverse the divide.

Jason Moran is one of them. A celebrated jazz pianist-composer, he’s known for pushing traditional notions of stagecraft to expose the theatrical associations between art and music. He’s made numerous records, performed with his wife, the opera singer-actress Alicia Hall Moran, at the Whitney and the 2015 Venice Biennale, and currently serves as the artistic director for jazz at the Kennedy Center. Given his extraordinary breadth, Moran’s 2010 MacArthur “Genius” Grant feels almost expected.

But this spring kicks Moran’s career up yet another notch. In April, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis will present his first museum exhibition, introducing him to a wider audience while giving those familiar with his ingenuity a chance to view his various art forms under one roof.

The show features in-gallery performances, works on paper and the artist’s acclaimed music hall vignettes. Based on historic music venues, these shrines are sound-sculpture hybrids that capture the visual and social history of jazz in America. Shown at the 56th Venice Biennale, STAGED: Savoy Ballroom 1, for example, pays tribute to the once-storied Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. And Moran enthusiasts will be enticed by the Walker’s plans to unveil a newly commissioned addition in this series, which is as much an homage to the musical canon as it is a lament of cultural erasure.

“The history of jazz and the history of sound is the history of man,” Moran told me when we spoke of his upcoming Walker exhibition. “We also have to think of the architecture and stages that enabled artists to have the freedom to play as crazy as they needed. The solo is about liberation. The solo is a political movement. People around the world, whether in Brazil or Japan, have adopted jazz because it is freedom music.”

Born in Houston, Moran credits Thelonious Monk as his first true inspiration, whom he discovered as a teenager among his father’s records. Indeed, all of Moran’s work evokes a cardinal tenet of jazz: collaboration. In a set, of course, musicians riff off one another to create a rich, symbiotic experience and Moran has teamed up with a venerable list of contemporary artists— Glenn Ligon, Joan Jonas, Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson—to name just a few. Following the 2016 election, Moran regularly joined Julie Mehretu in a pop-up studio of sorts, in a former neo-Gothic Harlem church, where she was creating a pair of massive abstract canvases for SFMOMA’s lobby. True to form, Moran composed an emotional soundtrack on the church’s balcony inspired by Mehretu’s signature turbulent brushwork. The two artists fed off each other’s energy. Given the fraught political climate, it felt like a reckoning.