Many of the biggest players in the postwar jazz era combined several roles mostly kept separate in prewar days: improvising soloist, composer, arranger, bandleader. There were many such men in the 1950s and 1960s – Jimmy Heath, Benny Golson, Oscar Pettiford – but as public taste and economics went another way, fewer had an opportunity to lead large-scale bands of their own. And only one player-composer put together a big band that outlived both of its founders, becoming one of the longest-lasting jazz orchestras ever: Thad Jones.

Where the bandleaders of the swing age were colorful personalities who achieved a degree of celebrity, Jones (1923-1986), was strictly a music-maker, and he was known well primarily by jazz insiders. Many of the music’s key gatekeepers put their faith in Jones and his music. Count Basie first brought Jones to national attention, Charles Mingus produced and played bass on his first sessions as a leader, and producer Alfred Lion gave him a chance to show what he could do on three classic Blue Note albums.

It was Village Vanguard impresario Max Gordon, however, who helped Jones and his partner, drummer Mel Lewis, show the world that the jazz big band was not dead. It has been 40 years since the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra made its debut, and that anniversary is being celebrated in a variety of ways by two of jazz’s premiere organizations.

This week the Vanguard, the band’s home for all of its four-decade existence, is presenting a six night tribute to different aspects of the band’s legacy, with a special emphasis on Thad Jones’s music. Next week, Jazz at Lincoln Center will mount a two tiered tribute. For six nights at Dizzy’s Club Cola-Cola, Jones-Lewis alumnus Joe Lovano will reinterpret the music of Thad Jones with his quartet. Later in the week, the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, under the direction of Wynton Marsalis, will present “Swinging Music of Thad Jones,” a program of the late composer’s works in new arrangements by LCJO trombonist Vincent Gardner.

Thad Jones was the middle son of one of the most famous families in jazz, brother of Hank Jones (born 1918), who remains one of the most eloquent pianists in all of music, and Elvin (1927-2004), the virtuoso drummer best known for his work in John Coltrane’s classic quartet. He grew up in Detroit and worked with his brothers and local bands before serving in the Army from 1943 to 1946.

Jones was never the spotlight-grabbing type. He devoted his energies to the musical process and virtually nothing to his own career. It says something that the man who founded the most successful jazz orchestra of the latter part of the 20th century never had a hit record and wrote only one work that has become even a jazz standard. That song – “A Child Is Born” – is well known not only for Jones’s beautiful melody but for Alec Wilder’s uncharacteristically optimistic lyric.

Even after the war, Jones, like certain other musicians of his approximate generation, was a comparatively late bloomer. One of his compositions for Basie was titled with his own nickname: “The Elder.” He recorded for the first time in Detroit with tenor saxophonist Billy Mitchell in 1948, but remained “undiscovered” until 1954, when he joined Count Basie’s Orchestra at the age of 31.

Basie was of two minds about the young Jones. He clearly was a major talent, but his arrangements and compositions were not always exactly right in the Basie pocket. The count regarded many as too “progressive” even for his “New Testament” band. As a result, Basie only recorded a dozen or so of Jones’s works (such as “To You,” “Not Now, I’ll Tell You When,” and “Counter Block”). Yet he had no reluctance about extensively featuring Jones as a trumpet soloist, and Jones is heard on such 1950s Basie classics as “April in Paris” and “Corner Pocket” (he makes his entrance on the former with “Pop! Goes the Weasel”).

At the same time, Jones began to be recognized as one of the new stars on trumpet. He traveled in more modern circles than most of his fellow Basieites, and was regarded by many as being in the same category as those upcoming stars, Clifford Brown and Miles Davis. He made his debut albums as a leader for Charles Mingus’s Debut Records label in 1954, and in 1956 and 1957 he was at the helm of an impressive series of albums for Blue Note, two of which were titled “The Magnificent Thad Jones.”

After Jones left Basie in 1963, he settled in New York to become one of the busier freelance arrangers on the scene. He began working with Mel Lewis (1929-1990), a powerhouse of a drummer who had spent most of his career in the studios and clubs of Los Angeles. As it happened, Count Basie had commissioned an album’s worth of orchestrations from Jones, but once again he decided they were too far out for his tastes. He paid Jones for his work, and said he could do what he liked with the charts. Jones and Lewis began assembling a dream band for the purpose of playing this specific body of work.

Lewis had relocated to New York to work with Gerry Mulligan’s great Concert Jazz Band. Indeed, when Jones and Lewis began putting together their own band in the mid-1960s, it was regarded as extension of the great Mulligan Orchestra (especially considering the contributions of trombonist arranger Bob Brookmeyer). Soon they came to an agreement with Max Gordon of the Vanguard. Because Monday was traditionally the off-night in New York clubs and theaters and because the two leaders could get the best musicians in New York to work for a fraction of what they normally charged, a whole tradition of Monday night orchestras was born.

The Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra began recording in 1966, and it made its most memorable albums between then and 1970 for the Solid State label (these were collected in a Mosaic box 10 years ago). As a writer, Jones was always bursting with interesting ideas. His uptempo swing pieces and blues numbers could be rather complicated – like “Central Park North.”

The song starts as a straight-ahead swinger, then goes into a funky riff featuring Richard Davis’s electric bass. After a pause, there is a lovely pastoral episode featuring Jones himself on flugelhorn. As soon as he finishes, the mood switches to muted trumpeter Jimmy Nottingham growling the blues. Then Jerome Richardson (one of the band’s great reed stars, along with Jerry Dodgion) plays a solo on soprano that’s equal parts Ornette Coleman and Pee Wee Russell. Mel Lewis gradually steers the piece back to danceable funk.

As intricate as “Central Park North” is, Jones’s ballads, such as “Consummation” and “A Child Is Born” were simplicity itself. The latter, first recorded in 1970, has pianist Roland Hanna first stating the melody essentially unaccompanied, before the composer finishes his own tune, again on flugelhorn. The other horns, dominated by Mr. Dodgion’s flute, gradually come in behind him, offering a background that blends the traditional, almost maternal warmth of the horn ensemble with the dramatic dissonances of the modern era.

Jones remained with the band until 1979, when he accepted an offer to lead the Danish Radio Jazz Orchestra in Denmark. Lewis continued to lead it until his death in 1990. For the last seven years of his life, Jones served as a galvanizing force for musicians in Europe: conducting, composing, playing, and teaching. When he died in 1986, memorials were staged on both sides of the Atlantic, most notably at St. Peter’s here in New York. One young Danish musician, in his testimonial to his fallen teacher, said, simply, “Thad Jones was my God.” A lot of players in a lot of countries felt exactly the same way.

Thad Jones plays the Village Vanguard May 9-16 (178 Seventh Avenue South, between Waverly Place and Greenwich Avenue, 212-255-4037) and Jazz at Lincoln Center May 19-21 (33 W. 60th Street, 212-258-9999).