Given that they’re both New Orleans natives, it’s reasonable to assume that Victor Goines was called to join the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra because he shares bandleader Wynton Marsalis’s southern heritage, as well as a broad knowledge of jazz history. And it’s true that Big Easy connections did play a part in Goines’s hiring, but not quite in the way that you’d expect.

“Our long acquaintance would have had little to do with it, actually,” Goines reports via cellphone, while negotiating traffic in his adopted hometown, Chicago. “In fact, I probably thought he was ignoring me. Instead, the way I came to be part of the band was that [long-time Marsalis sideman] Wess Anderson recommended me to play baritone sax and bass clarinet on a piece that Wynton had composed called Six Syncopated Movements. It was a commissioned work for the New York City Ballet, and they were looking for a baritone-sax player who needed to be able to play a fair amount of bass clarinet.

“Lo and behold, I got the call from Wynton,” Goines continues, “and he said, ‘I’d like to see if you can play these parts for me. Do you own a bass clarinet?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ ”

There was just one small problem: he didn’t.

“I lied,” Goines admits, laughing. “But I was playing with Wynton’s dad, Ellis, at the time, and Ellis had just acquired a brand-new Yamaha bass clarinet. So I said ‘Hey, Mr. Marsalis, can I borrow your bass clarinet?’ The music was hard as hell, and I didn’t really have that much bass-clarinet experience. But I wasn’t going to let that opportunity get away!”

Goines took the money he made from the New York City Ballet gig and bought his own bass clarinet; his assortment of horns helped convince the younger Marsalis to hire him on a more regular basis. But when the two come to Vancouver with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, Goines probably won’t need his secondary instruments—although he’s not entirely sure about that.

“If my notes are correct, I’m told that we’re doing the music of Blue Note,” he explains. “And while that’s a little specific, it’s still kind of vague in that our arrangements haven’t been selected. But we’ve done many concerts that featured the music of Blue Note Records, so there’s quite a few things to pick from.”

Most of those things, he notes, will call on him to play his primary instrument, the tenor saxophone. From the early 1950s through to the end of the ’70s, the Blue Note label was home to many of the instrument’s great practitioners. Sonny Rollins, Hank Mobley, Joe Henderson, Dexter Gordon, Ike Quebec, Stanley Turrentine: the list is endless. Goines cites John Coltrane’s Blue Train as an especially influential Blue Note recording, but adds that the biggest impact the label had was by way of its overall ethos, rather than through any one musician.

“The perfection was in the music that the musicians created, not the technology,” Goines says. “You might hear something that’s less than technically perfect—and there’s not many of those, to be honest with you—but the musicians were so brave. They just came in and did what they did, and the music came first.”

That’s always been his philosophy, too—even back in the days when he had to play on a borrowed horn.