Late Saturday night, July 7, 1956 – actually, it was after midnight, so it was Sunday, July 8 – Paul Gonsalves took his tenor sax to the front of the Peabody Park bandstand in Newport, R.I., and blew himself into jazz immortality with 27 straight choruses in the middle of Duke Ellington’s “Diminuendo in Blue” and “Crescendo in Blue.” I was one of the very fortunate people in Peabody Park that night, and it was one of the peak experiences of my life. (The track with the live recording from the recently released “Ellington at Newport” CD is in my disk drive as I type.) Therefore, when I came into the Jenkins Johnson Gallery to see “Roy DeCarava: In Time” and was greeted by a picture of the ineffably cool Duke, the memory of that night and so many other wonderful nights of music from the early days of the Newport Jazz Festival came flooding back over me.

The picture of Ellington, taken in 1967, is quite conventional for Mr. De-Carava. Ellington is well-lit, everything is in focus, the nondescript background is light,and the subject eyes the camera with his chin resting in his left hand. This is Duke Ellington, however, so the material of his tuxedo has an unusual floral pattern woven into it, and there is an uncommon cuff on the sleeve. And would someone as elegant as he wear a “square”clip-on bow tie when he knows how to tie one?

But it is Ellington’s face – the high forehead, the distinguished gray sideburns, the expressive brows over his eyes and the emblematic pouches under them,the intelligence and wit,and especially the lower lip tucked inward a bit – that makes us linger over this portrait. Even while he poses for the camera, his mind is going over some music, and it is in the lip that the tension shows.

The lip would probably disqualify the picture from being used as an album cover, but it is characteristic of Mr. DeCarava that he included it. A majority of the pictures of the “In Time” exhibition are of musicians, and Mr. De-Carava shows his great respect by revealing them as mortal human beings, however talented and complex, and not just as the spotlighted larger-than-life mythic heroes of much contemporary music. They are real people, not mere “icons,” and as such are capable of sustaining his scrutiny and love. The wonderfully affectionate “Louis Armstrong” (1952) shows the great trumpeter striding down a sidewalk in Harlem, people on the stoops turning their heads to follow him, his Satchmo grin in place, looking for all the world like a one-man parade.

“Jam Session, Kenny Karpe’s” (1956) is a mass of people in an apartment making and listening to jazz. One man in a corner plays a saxophone, another with his back to us plays a guitar, and a third reflected in a mirror is bent over a bass. Away from the glitter of nightclubs and festivals, the audience is more deeply involved in this private space than it might be in public. The three men seen in profile in the lower right are paying close attention, as are the three men craning in at the door in the middle; the woman turned away from us with her back against the doorframe is clearly listening, and so is the intense man in black-framed glasses sitting at the table with his hand to his head and a can of beer, which he is too occupied to touch,in front of him.Oh, to have been there!

There are more than a dozen pictures of Billie Holiday, most in a single side space of the gallery. Several are not particularly interesting, but “Billie Holiday and Hazel Scott at Party” (1957) is another instance of the private jazz-making Mr. DeCarava had access to. Holiday is seen in profile sitting on a stool to the left, her face lit by a lamp on the piano Scott is playing.The jazz classic “Christopher Columbus” is one of the scores on the piano’s music rack. Although Scott has her back to the camera, her head is turned enough toward the singer for us to see the ex pression on her face, the admiration and appreciation of one outstanding musician for another.

In the informal “Billie Holiday, Hazel Scott and Leonard Feather” (1957), a cheery, social Holiday looks on as the jazz critic busses Scott on the cheek. But “Billie Holiday, Singing” (1957) takes us into different territory altogether.

Mr. DeCarava is famous for printing his own works, and “Billie Holiday, Singing”is an example of why he has to. The negative of “Billie Holiday, Singing,” like many of his negatives, must be incredibly thin. A negative is “thin” when the picture is taken in insufficient light. If a negative is not exposed to enough light, little of its silver remains when it is developed, and the details are lost. Shooting jazz musicians, Mr. DeCarava was often working with next to no light, but he could miraculously coax powerfully expressive images from his necessarily thin negatives: It must frequently have been that or no picture at all.

“Billie Holiday, Singing” is as black and difficult to decipher as an Ad Reinhardt painting. Mr. DeCarava’s black is luxurious, sensuous, deep as night, an effect not easily achieved in a photographic print. Peering into the dark, dark depths of this picture, eventually you see a slight glint off Holiday’s teeth, then her mouth open in song, and then a hint of her face in three-quarter profile.

Virgil Thompson once said Billie Holiday was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and there is evidence of that beauty in this picture, but there is also great pain. In 1957, Holiday was less than two years from her death, and Mr. DeCarava is straining here to bear witness to what he sees. He must have loved her greatly to have the courage to show her in so much pain. But she is singing, still singing, and that is in the picture, too.

Until March 11 (521 W. 26th Street, fifth floor, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-629-0707).