Marsalis leads Lincoln Center band at Kimmel

As one of the few working big bands left, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and its leader, Wynton Marsalis, have both a mission to uphold and the freedom to do so any way they choose.

If that means reimagining nursery rhymes, well, hey, so be it.

At the Kimmel Center's Verizon Hall on Friday night, Marsalis sat unobtrusively in the middle of the trumpet section, but still wielded his horn, the mike, and the band itself with authority. Marsalis is often criticized, sometimes with cause, for having a too-narrow vision of the music, but on Friday, Marsalis and his many arrangers, some right there on stage with him, did all they could to be creative, sometimes brilliantly so, within that vision.

The 15-piece aggregation opened with a brassy, shape-shifting "Appointment in Ghana" by Jackie McLean, and the song's dissonant, often contradictory phrasing represented complexity rather than conflict.

Lee Morgan's "Ceora," done as a sweet bossa nova, featured spacey, spacious time-sensitive palettes by pianist Dan Nimmer and restrained but passionate work by trumpeter Ryan Kisor. "Down by the Riverside" had the veneer of a rockin' Charles Mingus revival; when trumpeters Marcus Printup and Freddie Hendrix soloed testifyingly over nothing more than percussionist Ali Jackson's tambourine, the music, harmonically distinct from the original gospel, was nevertheless at its most soulful.

And when Nimmer and Duke Ellington veteran Joe Temperley, now 79, collaborated on Ellington's "The Single Petal of a Rose," Temperley's bass clarinet sweetly caressed a song he may have been playing for more than half a century; his dynamically sensitive stanzas were sometimes so intricately woven that the listener had to concentrate hard just to fully understand them.

As a personality, Marsalis was typically pithy, loopy, insightful, and, at times, hilarious. That personality always carries on to his relationship with his horn. The old heads - which Marsalis, at 47, will become soon enough - always spoke about how they talked with their horns. Marsalis does this as well.

"Itsy Bitsy Spider," one of a series of rhymes the band has performed, featured a loping, dirgelike tempo, but this was only the first in many of Marsalis' solos to demonstrate both the man's computerlike technique and his earthy, down-home instinct for connecting with the deep cultural core of the music.