If you want to understand what Joe Lovano is doing, start with the sound itself. It is big and woody, with a slightly rough edge that reminds you of the older tenor tradition — Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster — without being a museum piece. He does not have John Coltrane's intensity or Sonny Rollins's wit exactly, but he draws from both and adds something looser, more conversational. When Lovano plays, there is always a feeling that the music could go somewhere unexpected, and he seems genuinely fine with that.

He came up through some serious road work — the Woody Herman Orchestra, the Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra — which gave him a real working musician's relationship to time and ensemble playing. By the time he started making records as a leader in the late 1980s, he already knew how to hold a band together without dominating it. That is actually rarer than it sounds. A lot of technically impressive players make everything about themselves. Lovano has always been interested in the conversation.

His run of records for Blue Note in the 1990s is where most people find him, and Tenor Legacy (1993) and Universal Language (1992) are good places to start. But From the Soul (1991), a quieter record made with Michel Petrucciani, Dave Holland, and Ed Blackwell, is the one that shows you what he sounds like when there is plenty of space and nobody is rushing. It is a relaxed record in the best way — not sleepy, just unhurried.

He has also worked extensively with Paul Motian and Bill Frisell in a trio setting that became genuinely influential, not because it invented a new genre but because it demonstrated how much could be left out while still saying something worth hearing. That trio had a deliberate, searching quality — lots of space, tempos that floated rather than marched. It suited Lovano well. He has always been a player who benefits from room to move.

Later in his career he founded the Us Five group and kept exploring, sometimes in ways that worked better than others. That is fine — a long career with some detours beats a short one with none. What remains consistent is the seriousness of his engagement with whatever he is playing. He is not coasting on reputation or recycling old formulas. At this point he has earned the right to do either, and the fact that he does not is maybe the most telling thing about him.