India, May 22 -- It was sometime in the late 1970s, on a woozy summer afternoon in a city I no longer live in, that a much older friend - someone I admired and looked up to - put a record on that stopped me where I sat.

The room was warm, the light was thick, and the music that came through the speakers had a quality I had no vocabulary for: orchestral but intimate, melancholy but never sentimental, dense with texture and yet utterly spacious. The trumpet (and I understood even at age 17 that it was a trumpet) sounded less like a brass instrument and more like a human voice at the very edge of speech, pressing against some inexpressible barrier, reaching for something just beyond language.

The album was Porgy and Bess (1959). The trumpe...