• Jazz musician Donald Harrison's new album, "The Magic Touch," explores one composition through ten different musical genres.
• Harrison's career has been defined by blending traditional jazz with other styles like hip-hop, funk, and New Orleans second-line rhythms.
• The saxophonist is also the Big Chief of the Congo Square Nation Afro-New Orleans Cultural Group, a role inherited from his father.
• Harrison is scheduled to perform selections from his new album at Aretha's Jazz Cafe in Detroit.

There are musicians who don't like being put in a box.

Then there's NEA Jazz Master Donald Harrison, who apparently looked at the boxes, grabbed 10 of them and decided to play in all of them at once.

That, essentially, is the wonderfully mad-scientist premise behind the New Orleans saxophonist's new album, “The Magic Touch.” Instead of writing an album's worth of unrelated tunes, Harrison takes the title composition on a grand tour through musical styles: post-bop, reggae, New Orleans second-line jazz, bossa nova, blues, chill trap hip-hop, soul and smooth jazz, tropical salsa, Afrobeat and Harrison's own "nouveau swing."

If that sounds more like a musical laboratory than a traditional jazz record, good. Harrison has spent an awfully long career demonstrating that tradition is much more interesting when treated as a foundation rather than a fence. “The Magic Touch” isn't merely Harrison showing that he can play a bunch of genres; it's a chance to hear how profoundly context can change one composition.