TRISHA BROWN -- AND ALL THAT JAZZ.

To those who know Trisha Brown as queen-veteran of the cerebral dance avant-garde, it may come as a shock that she's unveiling a jazz work in her February Kennedy Center premiere.

In fact, it's Brown's second dance set to Dave Douglas's small-ensemble jazz (the first was last year's Five Part Weather Invention). The real surprise here, though, is not the sudden link between Brown and jazz, it's Brown's own discovery that jazz doesn't mean new territory. It means coming home to her dancing roots.

You don't hear this right away in a conversation with Brown. First you hear about the research: how Brown has jumped into jazz history the way she studied baroque polyphony before tackling Bach (in the 1995 M.O.) or mastered twelve-tone scales before she approached Webern (in the 1996 Twelve Ton Rose). You hear about the new methodology. She and her dancers are gleefully improvising to a percussion score; they are imitating and transforming the moves of the great thirties black dancer Leon James. It isn't abstract thought but painstaking bodywork that has brought Brown to her near-Proustian revelation: that all the social dance in America comes from Africa, and therefore, that her own dancing has been African all along.

"In my little pink-white body back in Aberdeen, Washington, doing the jitterbug--I thought such dancing came out of the air," says Brown. Now she sees that the stuff of jazz "came pouring into this country on the devastated hides of totally displaced African tribal people." Yet the humility--even humiliation--Brown feels at not seeing this earlier is offset by the sheer release of recognizing where so much of her own choreographic impulse came from. After all, Brown didn't just do the jitterbug, she studied dance at Mills College with the legendary Ruth Beckford, disciple of Katherine Dunham. And as the Kennedy Center dance comes near to completion, an interviewer hears in Brown's tone that special excitement of an artist in awe of what's welling up inside and around her. Last year's Five Part Weather Invention, explains Brown, "was about transitioning out of abstract choreography, with a focus on rhythm and improvisation. This one is there."

Two out of Brown's nine dancers are African-American--and yes, Brown admits, Keith Thompson and Stacy Spence do have a special ease with the new material. "They look like two gazelles going across the floor." She rejects the idea, though, that these two are fundamentally different onstage from her other dancers. "You know something?" says Brown thoughtfully. "We're all African-American when we're doing this."