Clark Terry was a role model and early influence on the young Miles Davis when Davis first began to play the trumpet professionally back in their native St. Louis. Mr. Terry’s decision this year to deliver his own take on the arrangements Gil Evans wrote for Davis’s classic 1958 album “Porgy and Bess” was a splendid way to return the compliment. And the result (American Music 9902) is, for my money, the jazz album of the year.

Where Davis was often referred to as “The Prince of Darkness,” Mr. Terry could be called “The Happy Prince.” And thus “Porgy and Bess,” based as it is entirely on the works of a great American songwriter – George Gershwin – and rooted as it is in Broadway show music, it ideally suited to Mr. Terry’s ebullient outgoing personality. By bringing his ebullience and optimism to the Evans-Davis arrangements, he has fashioned a very effective response to those two men’s own unique interpretation.

The Gil Evans-Miles Davis “Porgy and Bess” was different from most other treatments of the score in one key aspect: Its emphasis on the spiritual and folk elements of the score over the Broadway and operetta aspects. This split is inherent in the work, the result of the unusual collaboration that created it. For though all the music and the original orchestrations of “Porgy & Bess” were by George Gershwin, the lyrics came from both the composer’s longtime collaborator and brother, Ira, and DuBose Heyward, the South Carolina poet who wrote the novel the opera was based on.

The most famous song in the whole opus – the opening lullaby “Summertime” – is Heyward, not Gerswhin. But in general the songs that stand out are the ones by Ira Gershwin – “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’,” “It Ain’t Necessarily So.” These are the numbers most often performed as individual songs, and, not surprisingly, most albums of “Highlights from ‘Porgy and Bess'” concentrate on these.

The songs with lyrics by Heyward are something else entirely. When Heyward wrote his texts for Gershwin to set to music, he was trying to capture the authentic cadences of African-American folk music – spirituals, work songs, street cries, and blues. These are folk-opera pieces so fully integrated into the work that they are seldom heard outside of the full context of the production.

When Davis and Evans released their version, it was assumed they included many lesser-known songs from the opera – “Buzzard Song,” “Prayer (Oh, Doctor Jesus)” – because they wanted to avoid the overly familiar songs everybody else was doing. In retrospect, it seems they wanted to emphasize the Southern vernacular aspects of the music. Davis and Evans were also not bound to the order of the numbers in the score, and therefore they began not with “Summertime” but with the crashing dissonances of “Buzzard Song” (which in Evans’s chart sounds like Chinese opera).

Mr. Terry and the Chicago Jazz Orchestra, founded by conductor Jeff Lindberg in 1978, recorded the new album in late 2003 and early 2004 in Chicago and New York. The orchestra is playing the exact same Gil Evans arrangements that Davis recorded (unfortunately, you have to read the booklet to know that, since Evans’s name isn’t mentioned anywhere on the outside covers). But even though Mr. Terry in many cases also adopts the exact same timbre that Miles Davis used, he sounds entirely distinctive.

It’s not just his way of attacking a note or phrasing a melody. It’s the way he falls off a cadence, makes an entrance or an exit. Mr. Terry’s statement on “Bess, You Is My Woman Now” is, on the surface, identical to Davis’s. But where Davis is somewhat guarded in his optimism – “singing” the melody with a sense of foreboding that Bess might not always be his woman – Mr. Terry is more openly joyous. So what if she won’t be around for long? To Mr. Terry, the key word in the lyric is “now.”

Davis and Evans made one significant addition to Gershwin. Among the most stirring melodies in the score is the choral funeral song “Gone, Gone, Gone.” Evans, appropriately, assigned its central theme to the instrumental ensemble, rather than the trumpet soloist. But because that evidently wasn’t enough “gones,” Evans added a new cut, titled simply “Gone,” in which a vigorous drum solo by Philly Joe Jones gets the funeral going with a bang.

Mr. Terry and Mr. Lindberg retain this addition, and they add to it one of their own. Perhaps realizing that Davis’s tightly-harmon-muted “I Loves You Porgy” was so distinctly Milesian as to be sacrosant, they came up with a new, slightly longer chart in the Evans idiom. It features a brass duet by Mr. Terry on trumpet and Art Hoyle playing flugelhorn in Mr. Terry’s own style.

Mr. Terry is appearing this week with Monty Alexander and Freddy Cole at the Blue Note. And though it’s supposed to be a Christmas show, I hope he will find time to play at least one of the tracks from “Porgy and Bess.” He and Mr. Lindberg do a splendid job proving that the classic jazz orchestrations are as durable and subject to reinterpretation as great classical works – and they seem to have had a lot of fun in the process.

“To Nat With Love, A Nat King Cole Christmas” at the Blue Note December 21-26 at 8 p.m. & 10:30 p.m. (131 W. 3rd Street, 212-475-8592).