Steve Turre can still recall the day he met Rahsaan Roland Kirk, the blind reed player who changed his life. "I sat in with him when I was 18. We're still friends," Turre says. Kirk died in 1977.

Talking by phone from his New York apartment, Turre speaks with a deep growl, not unlike the sound of his primary instrument, the trombone. His conversational style is reminiscent of the beatniks.

Kirk, who toured with Turre on trombone four decades ago, taught him about the legacy of playing conch shells. "He just played one note, but the tone quality was really beautiful. It made people listen. It was peaceful; it made things calm down," he says. "I was really attracted to that sound, so I went and got a shell and started experimenting. One thing led to another and I do what I do."

What he does is play beautiful solos using the most ancient of instruments. The shells look as though they have just been taken from the ocean, even though he makes one key adjustment, cutting off the end to make an opening the same size as a trombone mouthpiece.

Turre, a Mexican-American, is one of the jazz world's leading trombonists. He has played with everyone from Ray Charles to McCoy Tyner, and worked in the Saturday Night Live Band for 25 years.

"At first I was shy about presenting the shells," says Turre. "I didn't want people to perceive it as a gimmick. Then I went to Mexico on tour with Woody Shaw. I met my relatives, and they took me to the museum. I saw that it was a real instrument and part of my heritage. Nobody knows what it sounded like, but I saw ancient Aztec and Mayan artifacts that had the ends knocked off to make a mouthpiece like I was playing. They were carved works of art."

And when he plays the shells, "sometimes I can feel not only the ancientness of the sound, which is humbling as I'm playing it, but also Rahsaan's spirit will come to me sometimes," he says. "Rahsaan was a deep cat. He affected me profoundly."

Talk about a musical beginning; Turre's mother and father met at a Count Basie dance at Treasure Island, a club on an island between San Francisco and Oakland. As a kid, he watched his brother enjoying the saxophone, but he had to wait until fourth grade to get an instrument. Finally, in the music room, the day arrived.

"There was a poster of a marching band on the wall, and in marching bands the trombones are in front. I just looked at it and said, ‘Let me try that one.' I didn't know what I was in store for," he says.

In 1957, soon after he began playing trombone, Turre got even more energized about jazz. His parents took him to see Duke Ellington at the Oakland Auditorium. Coleman Hawkins was the guest soloist, Ella Fitzgerald the guest vocalist. In the band were Johnny Hodges, Harry Carney, Clark Terry, and Britt Woodman on trombone.

By his early 20s, Turre was in demand. Even though some of his former band leaders are dead, he talks about them in the present tense, as if they are part of his life today. Ray Charles, he says, "does all kinds of music, but it's all coming from the heart. Everything he does is feeling." As for Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers: "That's an institution of higher learning. It's the University of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, and it's an honor to attend that school."

From the Messengers, it was on to Dizzy Gillespie. "Oh man, Dizzy's another profound innovator," Turre says. "He was one of the fathers of the be-bop movement, and one of the fathers of Latin Jazz, and one of the fathers of world music before they even called it world music."

Some legends played on his albums, including Herbie Hancock. "The colors, harmonic voicings he comes up with are just off the chart. He inspired me to play things I cannot play," Turre says. And Tyner? "His rhythmic innovations are no less profound than Herbie Hancock's harmonic innovations. He puts something in the air that allows you to hear differently."

Another significant figure in his life was Shaw, who introduced him to Blakey and gave him his first record date. "He helped me find my own voice," Turre says. While he can't say enough about the jazz greats, he's got a different view of the stars who frequent Saturday Night Live: "They're people like you and me just doing their job. I'm not blown away by celebrity status."

Watching Turre play shells, it's obvious that they are different sizes, but does that correspond to, say, soprano, alto, tenor, and bass saxophones?

"You could look at it that way," he says. "The smaller shells have higher pitches. When I put my hand in the shell it lowers the pitch, so I can usually get the interval of a fourth [for example, the notes from C to F or from G to C] out of each shell. So by putting together shells of different sizes I can get different ranges, scales, so to speak. But I can't play a whole scale on one shell, I can only play half a scale."

As Turre reaches for the shells, he seems to know exactly which ones to pick up. "It's kind of like talking, it just kind of comes. I have certain phrases I like to use as part of my vocabulary, but it's like improvising on the horn. I just go with the flow," he says.

Turre will sometimes play two shells at once, harmonizing with himself. "I was influenced by Rahsaan playing multiple saxophones," he says. Indeed, Kirk would often play two or even three saxes at once.

Turre has been presented with shells after concerts, and has a couple dozen he hasn't made into instruments yet. And there's another reason people bring shells to concerts: "I've had people ask me to sign their shell. You think signing a baseball is hard, try signing a conch shell."

Steve Turre Quartet

Wednesday, June 16

Kilbourn Hall, Eastman School of Music, 26 Gibbs St.

6 & 10 p.m. | $25 or Club Pass