Lionel Loueke is every bit as amazing as everyone says. The Benin-born guitarist, who has been a presence on the international jazz scene for the last decade or so, is currently making the leap to headliner status with his first major-label album, “Karibu” (Blue Note), as well as his first starring engagement at a top-shelf New York club, the Blue Note.

Mr. Loueke is a dazzling, inventive player who has crafted a fully functional fusion of African music and American jazz. The outer context — centered on the tradition of a pre-established melody leading to an improvisation — is jazz, and so is the nature of his interactions with his bassist, Massimo Biolcati, and drummer, Ferenc Nemeth. The content itself, however — the sound and texture of his instrument — is purely African.

He also enhances his music with his voice, a kind of performance art that isn’t singing or chanting, but combines elements of both with what might be called a saxophone-style slap-tongue technique — only without a saxophone. Mr. Loueke’s notion of merging the two genres is never better realized than on the classic “Skylark” (on “Karibu”). His playing is a perfect realization of what the critic Stuart Nicholson once described as “glocalization,” an idiosyncratic style that is at once domestic and international, foreign and familiar.

Not surprisingly, the album, which features guest appearances by Wayne Shorter (who is riveting on “Naima”) and his frequent employer Herbie Hancock (on “Seven Teens”) is a more compelling listen than the live show. This is not only because Messrs. Shorter and Hancock are not present on the Blue Note stage, but because I have a hard time focusing on the guitar as a spotlighted instrument for the length of an entire set; Jim Hall and Bucky Pizzarelli are among the few living guitarists who can hold my attention for that long.

Mr. Loueke’s playing starts to sound jingly-jangly after a while, and I have to concede that I would rather hear him as a sideman with Mr. Hancock or Terence Blanchard. His playing sounds better in the context of keyboards and horns. But he’s an incredible player just the same — I’ve never heard anyone or anything like him.

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About the nicest thing you can say about Jazz at Lincoln Center is that it has afforded New Yorkers ample opportunities to hear the near-legendary Gerald Wilson. Though born in Mississippi, the composer-arranger-trumpeter-bandleader and general cutup has made Los Angeles his home since 1944, when he formed the first of many editions of his orchestra. Thanks largely to JaLC, he has appeared more in New York in the last five years than at any previous point in his 70-year career.

This week, the 89-year-old Mr. Wilson is serving as a guest conductor with the Juilliard Jazz Orchestra at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola. In tandem with JaLC’s annual student-band competitions, which culminate in the big “Essentially Ellington” concert Saturday, the theme at Dizzy’s this week is Ellingtonia. This is a natural for Mr. Wilson, who played in the Ellington band on several occasions and was one of the few orchestrators commissioned by the Maestro himself to write for the Ellington band.

On Wednesday night, after the trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater led the Juilliard band through half a set of authentic Ducal classics, Mr. Wilson, with his famous Albert Einstein-style white hair, ascended the stand and delivered a mini-cycle of his own takes on essential Ellington. His rearrangements of “Sophisticated Lady” (spotlighting tenor rather than baritone sax), “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” (retooled as a muted trumpet feature), and “Perdido” (famously recorded by Ellington himself) weren’t exactly “modernizations,” even though that was what Ellington asked for when he called upon Mr. Wilson to write them. Rather, they were personal interpretations honoring both the big-band swing and bop traditions.

As an encore, Mr. Wilson and the Juilliard Orchestra played two movements from the conductor’s most recent extended work, “Monterey Moods,” commissioned by that city’s famous jazz festival. Considering that he’s written many more orchestrations of Ellington tunes, including an evocative “Come Sunday” (from 1945) and a luxurious “I Got It Bad” (1967), it’s time to present an entire program of Mr. Wilson arranging and conducting Ellington.

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In “Move On,” Karen Akers’s new show at the Oak Room, the singer celebrates beginnings, endings, and transformations. She begins with a vivid illustration of what she means: Stephen Sondheim’s “The Glamorous Life” fades into “I’m Checking Out,” by the cartoonist and folk singer Shel Silverstein, and then into “Ready To Begin Again,” by the R&B composers Lieber and Stoller. From there, musical director Don Rebic leads the music full circle into Mr. Sondheim’s “Move On.”

Ms. Akers is taking full advantage of the strengths of the cabaret medium, one of which is the combination of songs from various genres (though most of the pieces are musical monologues from the last 40 years of Broadway). Together, they present a coherent concept with many different points of view that both support and contradict one another.

One of the most touching pieces in Ms. Akers’s show is “My Garden,” a new Stephen Flaherty-Lynn Ahrens number that praises the idea of not going anywhere or doing much of anything other than puttering about with the petunias. Her contralto is stronger than I’ve heard it in years, and she’s using her belt voice a lot more often, giving her singing much more dynamic and emotional depth. Some of her protagonists embrace the idea of change assertively, others only reluctantly, but in the end, they all fall into line with the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who observed in the fifth century B.C.E.: “Change is the only constant. Change alone is unchanging.”

wfriedwald@nysun.com