For those unaware, John Ellis devoted his previous Blue Room Music outing, Bizet: Carmen in Jazz, to spirited adaptations and arrangements from that renowned late 19th-century opera.

For the follow-up, Heroes, the acclaimed saxophonist and multi-reedist shifts focus back to original music: a program of eight compositions inspired in various ways by mentors, legends, friends, family — “heroes” broadly defined.

Pianist Gary Versace and bassist Reuben Rogers, longtime Ellis collaborators who played with characteristic beauty on the Bizet recording, remain in the fold here, joining the extraordinary trumpeter Mike Rodriguez (SFJazz Collective) and the in-demand Kush Abadey (Melissa Aldana, Ethan Iverson) on drums.

The lineup in some ways echoes that of Rodriguez’s own 2021 quintet release, Pathways, which also featured Ellis and Versace.

Ellis embraced the challenge of working in this classic quintet idiom, his first musical love. “I’m 50 years old now,” he says, “and this is the music that got me, that made me want to play jazz for a living. And yet most of the things I’ve done as a leader are not so directly in this vein.”

He’s alluding, for instance, to genre-defying larger group projects such as The Ice Siren and MOBRO, or the sousaphone-driven Double Wide, which featured Versace on organ.

1. Slingshot
2. Beautiful Day
3. El Cid
4. Fort Worth
5. Three Jewels
6. Color Wheel
7. Linus and the Lyre
8. Other Saints

Recorded by Chris Allen at Sear Sound in New York, New York, USA on November 13th-14th, 2023, this organically cultured new recording opens on the languishing beauty of Slingshot (a tribute to John Coltrane) and then we get the decadent Beautiful Day (which itself alludes to “It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood”), a sumptuous, Western-hued El Cid (named for the medieval Castilian ruler Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar - subject of the 1961 epic film El Cid starring Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren) and the upbeat and joyful Fort Worth.

Along next is the all-embracing Three Jewels and that is in turn backed by the elegant balladry of Color Wheel (for Bill Evans), the music rounding out on the harmonically layered Linus and the Lyre (which references the Greek Heracles legend, in particular a scene right out of Tarantino where young Heracles slays the great music teacher Linus using a lyre as a weapon), coming to an all-too-soon close on the furtively sculpted, yet gloriously emboldened Other Saints (which evokes not only Ellis’s former NOLA stomping ground but the Caribbean as a whole).