At the start of his opening set at the Village Vanguard on Tuesday, trumpeter-composer Dave Douglas offered his apologies: “It seems that I am once again accused of having a new band.” Traditionally, bands that couldn’t stay together very long were a distinct problem for their members. Yet Mr. Douglas turns this potential liability into an asset. It’s one of the ways he is uniquely suited to thrive in the postmodern era.

Like many contemporary jazzmen, Mr. Douglas writes a specific body of music, often driven by a thematic concept, for a specific group of players. He records the music, then tours with the band for a while. Then, the next time you see him, he’ll be with a different group of musicians, a different set of compositions and a different concept. It’s not exactly like the days of the Modern Jazz Quartet or Louis Armstrong’s All-Stars, when a group worked together for years, until they could learn each other’s “poker-playing habits” (to use Duke Ellington’s phrase). But it is a creative and stimulating way to deal with the times.

Mr. Douglas’s latest group is called Nomad, a marvelously fluid ensemble responsible for the first release on his own label, Greenleaf Music (5802). It consists of a traditional front line of trumpet and alto sax (Myron Walden, who also played soprano and bass clarinet) and two players who continually move back and forth between the front line and the traditional bass role, Marucs Rojas (tuba) and Ruben Kodhell (cello). The prodigious drummer Tyshawn Sorey, who both physically and temperamentally could be called the Cyrus Chestnut of percussion, is at the center of everything.

Like much of the best contemporary jazz, Nomad’s music seems simultaneously old-school and cutting-edge. There are avant-garde shrieks and Dixieland polyphony. Mr. Sorey’s reliance on the snare drum often made Nomad seem like a circus parade band in a Fellini movie. At times Mr. Douglas contrasted extreme distortion from both ends of the sonic spectrum, the piercing clarinet above and the grunting tuba. At others the cello and bass clarinet offered an acoustic simulation of electronic distortion.

Yet the emphasis throughout was on composition and melody. Every number features improvised solos, but they were always played at the service of the tune. Mr. Douglas’s melodies seem deliberately poised to make us think of other tunes: The minor key waltz “Gumshoe,” first stated on cup-muted trumpet, recalled “You and the Night and the Music” and “Russian Lullaby” simultaneously. Another was halfway between a New Orleans funeral dirge and “People.”

Mr. Douglas wrote a superb minor blues that mostly featured Mr. Rojas’s brass bass and a very moving memorial for his father (one of the only pieces he introduced and explained) in which the emphasis was on Ruben Kodhell’s cello. All the pieces are comparatively short – I can’t remember the last time I saw an album of new jazz with a full 13 tracks on it.

Less can be more, though, and the Nomad project is Dave Douglas’s finest music yet.

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Speaking of great jazz composers, the Broadway tunesmith Jule Styne, who would have been 100 this year, wrote more great standards performed regularly by jazz instrumentalists and singers than almost anybody – these include “Just in Time,” “Sunday,” “Time After Time,” and “Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out To Dry.” For standards popularized by Frank Sinatra alone, Styne more than deserves a place in the jazz hall of fame.

I sincerely hope that there will be a jazz celebration of his music sometime before his actual birthday on December 31, but the cabaret presentation at the Oak Room, starring K. T. Sullivan and Mark Nadler, gets this anniversary year off to a roaring start. Mr. Nadler and Ms. Sullivan have a knack for making us hear new things in classic songs.

He transformed the usually jaunty “Bye Bye Baby” into a melancholy song of separation. She took “People” – fixed in everyone’s minds by Barbra Streisand as a bombastic anthem of self-glorification – and made it exactly what Bob Merrill’s lyrics state: a song about people who need people. He stampeded through “I Met a Girl” with his usual elephant-driving-a-mack truck subtlety, as if it were Khachaturian’s “Sabre Dance.” But the highlight was her “Bells Are Ringing” selection, including the musical monologue “I’m Going Back,” which Ms. Sullivan rendered as a mixture of Hamlet’s soliloquy and a Jolsonesque “Mammy” song.

Don’t miss this show.

Until February 6 (178 Seventh Avenue South, at 11th Street, 212-255-4037).