By LOREN SCHOENBERG

Wynton Marsalis (Photo by Keith Major)

Wynton Marsalis has made signal contributions to American music, American composition, and American musical performance. He has produced an exceptional living legacy that more or less sums up the wide range of artistic avenues that have been unique to America since it began to evolve distinctive characteristics by appropriating influences from three places—the old world of Europe, the new world of North and South America, and the third world of Africa, Asia, and the Far East.

Because Marsalis has received so many accolades both in this country and the world over, we might be guilty of missing the significance of his enormous contributions as a composer—a problem that the Juilliard Jazz Orchestra decided to rectify when it planned an entire concert of Marsalis's music for April and found itself reveling in its quality, variety, range of feeling, and projection of an especially profound and coherent vision in which technique and expression are superbly intertwined.

This, of course, is no real surprise to anyone who has had the opportunity, as I have, to work with Marsalis and experience his musicianship in up-close and personal terms. For all of his acclaim—his television appearances, his awards, his Pulitzer Prize (he is the only jazz musician to have won one, in 1997 for his oratorio Blood on the Fields), and his founding and artistic stewardship of Jazz at Lincoln Center—the man is first and foremost a virtuoso trumpet player with an immense range of stylistic authority, and a stunning composer. His work falls in and outside of jazz, but is dominated by what some consider the richest scope of composing for large and small jazz ensembles to have emerged since the since the death of Charles Mingus in 1979.

What Marsalis, 45, has in common with Mingus is a disdain for the limitations of one style. His preference has been to call upon the entire range of jazz, from New Orleans to Ornette Coleman. This meant learning the specifics of many ways of making jazz music, but Marsalis started off with several crucial advantages. As a young man in his hometown of New Orleans, he had the good fortune to play with guitar and banjo legend Danny Barker, who exposed him to real New Orleans jazz. Marsalis was also lucky in that his father, Ellis, happened to be a first-class jazz piano player who worked in the style that formed between 1945 and 1960, blossoming and moving forward on the influences of Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Errol Garner, Ahmad Jamal, Horace Silver, Oscar Peterson, and Wynton Kelly. (Those of you who were unaware now know where the Marsalis who plays the trumpet got his first name.)

When Marsalis arrived in New York at age 17, he was working with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers and attending Juilliard. During that period he began to discover the aesthetic importance of approaches besides those developed by Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and others who reached pinnacles of creativity in the 1960s. Marsalis did not then reject any school, but began to expand his interests and develop an understanding of performing and composing that gave him much greater range of musical choice and technical application. He began to explore the varieties of timbre that musicians of different eras had added to their instruments. His discovery of Duke Ellington was an explosive epiphany on every level: Marsalis realized that there was so much more to do than he had thought possible. Still, it would be some time until he could list the wide range of influences that he would later share when an interviewer for Scholastic.com asked who were his favorite musicians: "Thelonious Monk for thematic development and for being modern without being ugly. Duke Ellington for range of creativity and fortitude. Lester Young for sweetness of sound and steel of personality. Louis Armstrong for the power of phrasing and the subtlety of a finely nuanced tone. Jimmy Yancey for down-home hoop and the proper swoop. Charlie Parker for making sure that you never become arrogant. John Coltrane just because. Billie Holiday for phrasing and intent. Count Basie because he took his time."

The repertoire on the Julliard Jazz Orchestra's April 10 program will provide a representative sampling of the enormous output Marsalis has created for large ensembles over the last decade or so, since his aforementioned Pulitzer Prize-winning oratorio on slavery, Blood on the Fields, which will be represented by two selections on the program: "Back to Basics," which lends the concert its title, and "The Market Place." Reed virtuoso Victor Goines, the artistic director of Juilliard's Jazz Studies Program, chose all of the compositions for the concert. Composer, faculty member, and master trombonist Wycliffe Gordon (who, like Goines, played almost of the premieres of these pieces) will conduct the concert.

Those selections will also include excerpts from Congo Square, written shortly after the mammoth disaster we know now as Hurricane Katrina and named for the area just outside New Orleans's French Quarter where, beginning in the 1700s, African slaves gathered to dance and play music. We will also hear Evolution of the Groove, which illustrates Marsalis's obsession with rhythmic patterns and his understanding of how drums evolved from their use in native African music to the jazz instrument which uses multiple percussion and cymbals as one set of sounds that has developed along with every stylistic shift in the history of jazz. Jump Start is an impressive piece written for a work choreographed by Twyla Tharp that was premiered by American Ballet Theater in 1995. Suite for Human Nature is a fable about the ever-endangered Mother Nature; it was premiered in December 2004 at Washington's Lincoln Theater with original lyrics by Diane Charlotte Lampert. Listen for the many allusions to Spanish music mixed in with the swing of jazz in the Vitoria Suite, which is dedicated to the city of Vitoria, Spain, where a Spanish jazz festival takes place every year.

Juilliard Jazz Orchestra Back to Basics: The Music of Wynton Marsalis Alice Tully Hall Tues., April 10, 8 p.m. Please see the Calendar of Events for more information.

Big Train seems almost a long-form development focused on the work of Duke Ellington, who loved to evoke the rumble and the rapidity and the smooth sailing on the metal rails of train tracks. Marsalis's phenomenal All Rise, premiered by the New York Philharmonic in 1999, is perhaps the most successful collaboration between a jazz and a symphony orchestra, using the wide sort of a creative palette we have come to expect from its composer.

While no single concert can encapsulate the essence of a composer as protean and complex as Marsalis, the Juilliard Jazz Orchestra's performance is likely to give listeners a satisfying taste of the many flavors to be found in the wide range of work by one of America's most creative jazz statesmen.

Loren Schoenberg, who teaches jazz history, has been on the faculty since 2001. He is the co-director, with Christian McBride, of the Jazz Museum in Harlem and regularly contributes articles on jazz to The Juilliard Journal.