Later this year, the trombonist Wycliffe Gordon will turn 40. Had he been born in 1917 or 1927, rather than 1967, he would have been one of those great old-time, all-purpose musicians like Trummy Young, Willie Smith, or Clark Terry (who is still very much with us) — the sort of musician who’s comfortable playing either swing or bebop, and who, channeling the almighty spirit of Louis Armstrong, can perform silly songs as well as serious blues, R&B, or even Gospel.

It seems hardly enough of a compliment to call Mr. Gordon the most distinctive trombonist of his generation, since the instrument doesn’t attract younger players like it did in the big band era. Jazz is a music with a lot of baggage, both musically and culturally, and the idea at the center of most contemporary playing is a rather complicated, mathematically-driven concept of improvisation based on navigating chord changes. Though he doesn’t neglect any of that, Mr. Gordon is a rare younger musician whose central motivation is the idea of entertaining a crowd. He is a player with a broad, warm tone who doesn’t just hit notes in chords, he enriches them with all manner of tonal inflections, growls, and distortions that make his already highly vocal instrument sound even closer to the human voice. And when that isn’t enough, he switches to one of his other horns — tuba, trumpet, Australian didgeridoo — or he sings.

Lately, Mr. Gordon has been involved in both movie and show music. On Wednesday night, as part of the Rubin Museum’s Harlem in the Himalayas series, he premiered what was advertised as a “Jazz-inflected score” to D. W. Griffith’s silent film masterpiece, “Intolerance.” This Sunday, he will headline a concert at Symphony Space with his frequent collaborator, the bassist Jay Leonhart, in a performance called “My Favorite Things: Jazz Hits From the Broadway Stage.” He and Mr. Leonhart have also released their first album together, “This Rhythm on My Mind” (Bluesback, available from CDbaby.com).

Griffith’s “Intolerance” — a film that was already 50 years old when Mr. Gordon was born, is one of those historical exercises that looks impossibly creaky in reproduced still images. Also, like nearly all silent dramas, it doesn’t translate easily to the small screen. But experienced in a theater, even one as small as the Rubin, it’s an entirely different experience. Since silent film is so dependent on the power of the moving image, it needs to be projected on a screen where it is larger than life, so as to draw you into it.

In 2000, Mr. Gordon scored a silent feature for the entire Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra called “Body and Soul,” which made its premiere at Avery Fisher Hall. For the Rubin, a considerably smaller space, he used a very different kind of ensemble, consisting essentially of two rhythm sections, with two keyboardists (Damien Sneed and Dr. Lewis Porter), two bassists (Mr. Leonhart and Matthew Rybicki), two trap drummers (Dion Parson and Alvin Atkinson), and a third percussionist (Abdou Mboup).

As this unconventional instrumentation suggests, Mr. Gordon was not encumbered by any attempt to create music that was historically authentic, either to 1916 or to any of the historical periods depicted in the film’s four interwoven stories. Instead, he utilized a vast panoply of jazz and bluesderived sounds: A funky soul jazz organ riff underscored polite dancing couples at a society function in the “modern” segment; the band played a painfully slow, twobeat shuffle rhythm when “The Boy” is led to the gallows; a shot of a “hopeful geranium” summoned a solo piano passage reminiscent of Duke Ellington’s “Single Petal of a Rose”; the famous establishing shot of Ancient Babylon was underscored by the exotic didgeridoo; a love scene was made more romantic with the interplay of trombone and piano.

This is not to say that every piece was spot-on. The accompaniment for an early massacre scene, in which striking workers are gunned down, struck me as being too swinging and cheerful. This is not a Saturday night fish fry, something stark and dissonant would have been more appropriate. However, the battle sequence during the siege of Babylon at the end of the first half of the film was gloriously exciting. So too was the climax, in which all four stories are rapidly intercut. Mr. Gordon had served a feast for the ears to accompany the banquet for the eyes that Griffith laid out 90 years ago.

My favorite of Mr. Gordon’s recordings are his collaborations, notably the 2002 “Head to Head,” a marvelous two-trombone album with John Allred. The new release, “Rhythm on My Mind,” by Messrs. Gordon and Leonhart, is as fun and frivolous as “Intolerance” is heavy and serious. The two player-singers consistently muster the best in each other: Mr. Gordon is emerging as a composer of simple, witty bonmots that manage to be free from self-consciousness and sarcasm — no small accomplishment in this cynical age. “Toast My Bread,” the sort of triviality that any of the three guys named Louis — Armstrong, Jordan, and Prima — could have fashioned into a chart hit in 1945, is, surprisingly, not a metaphor or a double entendre, even when Mr. Gordon sings “put my bread in your toaster and mash it down.”

Mr. Leonhart, who is 26 years older than his partner, is a veteran songwriter, but his work has never sounded better. He is best known for numbers specific to his experiences as a musician, songs about vanquishing squares with Louie Bellson, chatting on a plane with “Lennie” Bernstein, or being ignored by Dizzy Gillespie. But I have always preferred his more universal songs, which other performers can do, such as “Problem,” a King Cole Trio-ish rhythmic romp enhanced by Mr. Gordon’s supplementary voice. On the new album, serious moods appear in the form of two paeans to departed colleagues, “Freedom Jazz Dance,” now a memorial to composer Eddie Harris (with a fine tenor sax solo by Wayne Escoffery) and “Missin’ RB Blues,” which begins and ends with vintage voice mail from Mr. Leonhart’s mentor, the pioneering bassist Ray Brown.

Mr. Gordon has also enjoyed a near 20-year relationship with Wynton Marsalis, who, perhaps in an effort to personalize jazz for the lay public, often gives nicknames to his sidemen. He refers to Mr. Gordon as “Pinecone,” referring both to the trombonist’s rotund frame and his Georgia roots — as in the line “Moonlight Through the Pines” in “Georgia on My Mind.”

In this case, the handle has stuck — Mr. Gordon’s previous album, released in 2006, is called “Cone’s Coup.” That he accepts the “Pinecone” nickname illustrates that Mr. Gordon has a sense of humor about himself, which makes him well equipped indeed to bring a little swinging, lighthearted humor to a world that is increasingly intolerant of such things.

wfriedwald@nysun.com

January 28 at Symphony Space (2537 Broadway at 95th Street, 212-864-5400).