My first impulse is always to describe Lou Donaldson, whose 80th birthday will be celebrated in a tribute concert this week at Highlights in Jazz, as the greatest alto saxophonist in the world. No one would argue, not even fans of Lee Konitz and Phil Woods, the other surviving masters of Mr. Donaldson’s approximate generation. Yet there’s something about the solemnity of such a proclamation that seems at odds with the inherent joy of Mr. Donaldson’s playing.

Mr. Donaldson’s music isn’t about making careful comparisons or anything remotely academic. It’s about partying, having a good time, swapping jokes, boogieing down, trading insults, making love, giving birth. Much as I love Mr. Konitz and Mr. Woods, I somehow can’t imagine either of them singing Big Bill Broonzy’s “It Was Just a Dream” or describing their quartet as consisting of “the best musicians in the country — the trouble is that they’re no damn good in the city,” or introducing a sideman who comes from Alabama by saying, “Now we’d like to welcome him to the United States of America!”

In a phone interview last week, Mr. Donaldson spoke of how he wasn’t exposed either to jazz or to the saxophone until fairly late in his development. Growing up in Badin, N.C., he said, “I didn’t hear anything but country music and blues — mostly hillbilly music.” His mother, who taught music, all but forced him to practice the clarinet. It wasn’t until he was drafted and sent to the Great Lakes Naval Training Station in Chicago that he was exposed to a wide variety of jazz musicians and wanted to play the sax. “Everybody was in that band,” he said, “starting with [trumpeter] Clark Terry and [arrangersaxist] Ernie Wilkins, [saxist] Willie Smith, [arranger] Luther Henderson.”

Yet Mr. Donaldson continued to identify with those basic blues guitarists and singers he heard growing up in the South. After the war, he settled in New York (where he has lived for the last 60 years) and began to study music seriously, working extensively with R&B singers such as H-Bomb Ferguson and Larry Darnell and touring with Wynonie Harris. The blues remains such an essential part of Mr. Donaldson’s music that he would be equally at home playing at B.B. King’s as he is at the Village Vanguard.

To him, the blues isn’t just a kind of music, it’s an entire philosophy, one that underscores everything else he plays — whether it’s the blues or Cole Porter. At least a third of every album or every set Mr. Donaldson plays is in the 12-bar blues format, with some variation on the familiar I-IV-V chord pattern.

“To me the blues is how you feel at the moment, whether it’s happy or sad, fast or slow,” he said. Mr. Donaldson also stressed his particular admiration for musicians who have an individual voice on their horns; the thing he most decries about younger, more contemporary players is that, as he puts it, “they all sound alike — like they all went to the same school. Back in the day, you could tell me from Sonny Stitt from Art Pepper from Charlie Parker.” The blues remains the acid test, where the glory is not in the music itself — unlike other forms of music, the blues is basically just one song — but in how it is interpreted. Mr. Donaldson represents the generation of musicians who played the blues with a personal voice, rendering each note with an idiosyncratic nuance; three notes, and you know it couldn’t be anyone else.

After bebop and blues, the third “b” in Mr. Donaldson’s musical oeuvre is ballads; in the spirit of Parker and Johnny Hodges, who were superb balladeers as well as sublime bluesmen, Mr. Donaldson animates the music of Broadway with the same passion he brings to that of the Mississippi Delta.

“I used to see Lester Young at the old Birdland,” he said in that familiar high, squeaky voice of his. “Even on nights when he wasn’t playing, Lester would come and hang out. He used to tell me, to tell everyone, that we had to learn the words to the songs that we played: ‘You try to sing the song as you’re playing it, if you don’t know the words to the ballad, you can’t play it with the right feeling.'”

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Mr. Donaldson began his long, rewarding relationship with Blue Note records in 1952, first as a sideman with Milt Jackson and Thelonious Monk (“that was an experience — Monk didn’t have the music written out for us, he taught us our parts by ear”). It was at Blue Note, where musicians were normally allowed unparalleled artistic freedom, that Mr. Donaldson began adding Latin elements to his rhythm sections — usually in the form of the master conguero Ray Barretto. By the turn of the ’60s, he was regularly playing Cuban mambos, like “Herman’s Mambo,” “Cherry Blossom Pink,” “Green Eyes,” and Kingston calypsos such as “West Indian Daddy” and “Mary Ann.”

“I liked to bring in another percussionist to ‘shackle’ my regular drummer,” he said, “to keep him from getting too crazy.”

From the mid-’60s to the mid’70s, he was occasionally importuned to make what he calls “commercial” records, especially after Blue Note was absorbed into a larger conglomerate. He understands the impulse to sell records, but knows he can do so without resorting to electrifying his instrument or playing strict funk rhythms, as he did 35 years ago.

“See, I know what tunes will go over with listeners. I won’t record anything until after I’ve tried it out in front of audiences.”

At 80, Mr. Donaldson’s difficulties with pulmonary asthma force him to work less than he would like, but he still does a minimum of four weeks in New York every year — two at the Vanguard, two at Birdland. There are also two special appearances, like the concert he did with Wynton Marsalis’s band at the Apollo Theater in 2003, the Highlights in Jazz show in two days, and with pianist and fellow Blue Note veteran Freddie Redd at Merkin Hall next month. Still, he prefers the intimacy of the smaller night clubs.

“To me, all jazz — even bebop — is still dance music,” he said. “They tell me that record companies now would rather put old records than make new ones — that doesn’t surprise me, with the quality of the music the way it is today. It’s our mission to resettle jazz in the minds of the people.”

wfriedwald@nysun.com