It’s another vanguard year for the Village Vanguard. The longest-running jazz club in the world celebrated its 70th birthday in 2005, and this year marks the 40th anniversary of the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, the oldest, most successful big band of jazz’s postmodern era. This anniversary is being celebrated with a special performance and celebration tonight, and with a new album titled “Up From the Skies: Music of Jim McNeely” (Planet Arts).

Max Gordon, the founder of the Seventh Avenue club, started a trend with the introduction of the Monday night big band; now, Birdland and Iridium are among the many other clubs that present large-format ensembles on a weekly basis. Yet there’s no other group quite like the Vanguard Orchestra. Like the club itself, the orchestra has attained global fame, and it continues to attract the best players in New York – and the world.

Founded late in 1965 by the drummer Mel Lewis and the cornetist Thad Jones, what was then known as the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra initially consisted mostly of well-known jazzmen who weren’t otherwise busy on Monday nights. At the time, Lewis was best known for his long tenure with Stan Kenton; Jones, also a composer and arranger, had been a prominent member of Count Basie’s brass section.

They initially recruited stalwarts of their own generation, most notably the pianist Hank Jones and the saxophonists Jerry Dodgion, Pepper Adams, and Jerome Richardson – nearly all of whom were well-established stars who had recorded under their own names. These players, like the leaders, were veterans of the late swing era, and they served as an active link between such legends as Kenton and Basie and the younger music school graduates the band hired in the 1970s and ’80s.

Jones and Lewis jointly led the orchestra for a dozen years, until Jones moved to Denmark to lead his own group. After Lewis’s death in 1990, the band became more of a cooperative endeavor, and was renamed after the Lower West Side venue it has called home from the beginning. Although the band has lost its two founding fathers and most of the heavyweight players of the 1960s, it has grown into something even greater than it was in the beginning.

Whereas stars joined the band in the ’60s, by the ’80s stars were coming out of it. Both Tom Harrell and Joe Lovano “graduated” from Lewis’s ranks. In recent years, the decline in the number of studio jobs for jazz musicians has actually helped the VJO: Now talents on the level of Messrs. Harrell and Lovano (saxophonists Ralph Lalama and Gary Smulyan, for example) stay with the band because there is no place else for them to go.

The band’s principal musical director, Jim McNeely, joined the VJO in 1978, not long after he moved to New York from his native Chicago. He left the band six years later and did long stints with both Stan Getz and Phil Woods, but his return to the Vanguard in 1996 was taken as a sign of renewal for the VJO. Under his direction, the band began recording again, starting with 1997’s “Lickety Split: The Music of Jim McNeely.” Since then, the group has released three more CDs, including programs of the music of Jones and Slide Hampton, one of the band’s original orchestrators. (Between 1966 and 1970, the orchestra recorded six well-received albums, which were collected in a 1994 Mosaic box set titled “The Com plete Solid State Recordings of the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra.”)

The title track of the new album is a Jimi Hendrix tune. Mr. McNeely reports in the album notes that he first heard Hendrix around the same time that the first albums by the Jones-Lewis Orchestra began to reach him as a teenager in Chicago. Here he has aptly translated the guitarist’s tune into the big-band vocabulary – a blues for the millennial age.

Another highlight is a reworking of Mr. McNeely’s September 11-inspired spiritual “We Will Not Be Silenced.” It starts simply and solemnly, with almost whimsically muted brass, before Rich Perry plays an invocation in the higher register of his tenor saxophone. The theme then grows increasingly aggressive, defiant, and fast, winding up in a hard-hitting baritone solo by Mr. Smulyan.

Another VJO stalwart is the outstanding bassist Dennis Irwin, who has been with the band for two decades. In the album’s liner notes, Mr. McNeely describes Mr. Irwin’s playing as “deeply organic”; “Don’t Even Ask,” which includes the principal bass solo on the album, shows why.

The composition itself is fairly “organic” in the way the bass becomes increasingly prominent behind the solo of the alto saxophonist Billy Drewes.When Mr. Drewes stealthily drops out, Mr. Irwin assumes center stage and plays a nimble solo that’s both melody line and bass line. Mr.Irwin plays both completely unaccompanied and with all 15 musicians behind him, and he keeps the piece moving along deftly, no matter what the other players throw at him.

The bulk of the album is taken up by a three-part suite,”One Question,Three Answers,” which, as the title suggests, is driven by the concept of questions and responses. Each section is built around a dialogue between two soloists. The fast and dark “Almost Always” focuses on two lower-register instruments, John Mosca’s trombone and Mr. Smulyan’s baritone; “Hardly Ever” is lighter and more lyrical, spotlighting the higherpitched voices of alto saxophonist Dick Oatts and trumpeter Greg Gisbert.

The final part of the suite, “You Tell Me,” is as a two-tenor slugfest in the best Basie tradition, pitting Messrs. Lalama and Perry. These two voices sound like Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier going at it in the ring.

Not only do the saxophones spar during their solos, but Mr.McNeely has also conceived of the piece as a battle between different modes of jazz. Mr. Perry’s portion utilizes a modal concept, whereas Mr. Lalama’s interlude is based on bebop-style chord changes. After both men solo, they mix it up in an exchange of fours, which starts with Mr. Perry playing in a fuzzy, atmospheric manner while Mr. Lalama comes back at him with the sharper accents associated with great bop tenors like Dexter Gordon. I wouldn’t want the responsibility of having to name one as the winner any more than I would want to have to clean up the mess in the ring afterward.

The Vanguard Jazz Orchestra will launch its new album tonight at the Village Vanguard (178 Seventh Avenue at 11th Street, 212-255-4037).The band performs there every Monday night.