Wynton Marsalis is one of the few living composers in either classical music or jazz who has the advantage of his own orchestra – and, now, his own performance space – to play the new music he writes. As a composer, his reach has often exceeded his grasp, and, occasionally, his resources exceed his ability. But I, for one, am eager to see how this undeniably ambitious talent settles into his new home.

This Thursday, Mr. Marsalis will premiere his newest long-form composition, “Suite for Human Nature” – a work that requires not only the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra but a narrator, three vocal soloists, and the Boys Choir of Harlem. I was privileged to witness a performance last week, when the orchestra and the choir rehearsed the work together for the first time – not from the ensemble, but from the composer himself.

Seeing Mr. Marsalis explain the work to the boys in the choir was a moving experience in itself. At this key rehearsal, he was called upon to act out the piece for the Boys Choir – 40 young men who, though they are musically schooled sufficiently to read music and sight-sing, are still boys and therefore love a good story. As Mr. Marsalis went through the highlights of Diane Charlotte Lampert’s libretto – a unique retelling of the story of mankind that draws on the folklore and mythology of several cultures – the young singers reacted appropriately, giggling when he depicted the romantic relationship of Mother Nature and Father Time and the fate of their children.

“Suite for Human Nature” is certainly a big production, but for Mr. Marsalis it actually represents a step toward simplification. His two biggest works, “Blood on the Fields” (1997) and “All Rise” (2000), were so impossibly ambitious that it’s hard to imagine how anyone could have pulled them off.

“Blood” was a three-hour jazz opera that could have been effectively boiled down to a 45-minute or so suite (that’s roughly the length of Ellington’s best-known long work, “Black, Brown, and Beige.”) The religious “All Rise,” which also required a multidisc recording, combined the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and three complete choirs. Both works have their moments – sometimes fascinating ones – but overall they fail to sustain interest for their considerable lengths. The problem wasn’t Mr. Marsalis’s lack of talent as a composer but his lack of perspective as the editor of his own work.

“Blood” was the first work in jazz history to receive a Pulitzer prize and was the subject of much media attention. But “Big Train” (1998) – released during a season in which Mr. Marsalis literally buried record stores with new product – was virtually ignored. Yet it finds its way onto my stereo a lot more often than “Blood” or “Rise.”

The charm of “Big Train” was that the composer confined himself to a more traditional 18-piece jazz big band playing instrumentally. He stayed within familiar structures – song form, the blues – and adhered to the time-honored practice of Ellington and other swingera bands, depicting a locomotive in motion and doing it with wit and imagination. (There’s even a klezmer-style passage in the movement “Engine,” which suggests the Big Train passing through a Jewish neighborhood.)

It would appear that the less ambitious Mr. Marsalis gets, the more successful he is likely to be. His first album for Blue Note, “The Magic Hour” (72435), released a few months ago, is one of the most satisfying of his career. Stanley Crouch’s liner notes explain that the title refers to that time for young couples in between when their children go to bed and when the parents themselves go to sleep. All nine tunes are upbeat and cheerful: He’s not trying to depict large chunks of African-American history here or take us to church; he merely seeks to entertain, and this is no less worthy an ambition as educating or uplifting us.

Mr. Marsalis works here with just trumpet and rhythm section (Eric Lewis, on piano; Carlos Henriquez on bass; Ali Jackson on drums).This is not a common jazz format, though the trumpet quartet was briefly popularized in the 1950s by swing veteran Jonah Jones, who made a series of extremely popular (but seldom reissued) shuffle rhythm albums.

Mr. Marsalis doesn’t employ the Jonah Jones shuffle beat, but he does use rhythm very imaginatively. His strength doesn’t lie in traditional melodies but in taking catchy riffs and making them more catchy by applying an engaging meter, in the manner of Mr. Brubeck’s “Pick Up Sticks” and “Unsquare Dance.” The second track, “You and Me” begins with the trumpeter clapping out the backbeat while piano and arco bass set us up for his muted entrance – with such a catchy intro, he’s won us over even before he’s played a note.

Guest vocalist Bobby McFerrin is heard on “Baby, I Love You,” and Mr. Marsalis is to be commended for returning this prodigal vocalist back home to the jazz straight-and-narrow. Here, Mr. Marsalis and Mr. McFerrin extract more pleasure out of the simplest blues material (the lyrics are pretty much just the title over and over) than in any oratorio the former is ever likely to write.

Such simple pleasures are also at the heart of Mr. Marsalis’s newest release, the soundtrack album to the Ken Burns documentary “Unforgiveable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson” (Blue Note 64194), which will air next month on PBS. Johnson was both the first black heavyweight champion and the first black superstar of American popular culture. In evoking his era, Mr. Marsalis’s chief inspiration is another controversial African-American icon from the turn of the 20th-century, Jelly Roll Morton.

Mr. Marsalis has already dedicated an entire album to Morton’s music, “Mr. Jelly Lord – Standard Time Vol. 6” another superior effort that got lost in the 1998-99 Marsalis-athon. The Jack Johnson album re-uses three settings of Jelly Roll Morton classics – including Mr. Marsalis’s lively recasting of “New Orleans Bump,” one of the great riffs of the early jazz era – along with other period jazz classics like “High Society.” Mr. Marsalis has also written a dozen or so new compositions in the period style.

The result is a very vivid collage of African-American music in the first three decades of the previous century: New Orleans jazz, blues, ragtime, all filtered through Mr. Marsalis’s artistic sensibilities. For the cover, the Florentine Films people have found a photo of Jack Johnson where he looks so contemporary that he could be one of the Marsalis Brothers. The soundtrack is completely enjoyable, even when heard independently of the documentary itself, successfully making the man and his tragedy seem eternal.

“Suite for Human Nature” will be performed December 16-18 at 8 p.m. and December 19 at 3 p.m. (1 Columbus Circle, 212-258-9800).