When Dave Holland comes to the Berklee Performance Center this Friday with his 13-piece Big Band, it will represent a plateau of sorts for the 56-year-old bassist, composer, and bandleader. Not that his career hasn’t already been rich in achievement, in watershed moments both in personal terms and in the history of jazz. He was present at the creation of jazz-rock fusion, recording on Miles Davis’s In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew sessions. His work with the bands of Sam Rivers and Anthony Braxton in the mid ’70s helped set the agenda for jazz’s progressive wing, and an album of his own compositions he recorded from those years, Conference of the Birds (1972), with Braxton, Rivers, and drummer Barry Altschul, has come to be recognized as a classic. As a virtuoso bassist, he’s been associated with one "supergroup" after another, like the mid-’90s band with Pat Metheny, Herbie Hancock, and Jack DeJohnette. And since 1984, Holland has released a series of small-group recordings on ECM under his own name that have continued to define progressive post-bop jazz. In the meantime he’s been piling up one award after another for his playing and bandleading.

His new big-band album, What Goes Around (ECM), fulfills his work of the past 20 years — or the past 30 if you go all the way back to Conference of the Birds. With that release he demonstrated how jazz’s various strands could be drawn together to make a new music: bebop phrasing, harmonies, and velocity; the expansion of song forms like blues and folk; and a compositional style that moved in and out of the chord changes, incorporating the best of the "free jazz" movement in sturdy, buoyant structures. Since then, Holland has worked assiduously toward the jazz ideal of a musical universe where ensemble cohesiveness is at one with free individual expression — the perfect balance of composition and improvisation.

What Goes Around brings those ideas to their richest expression yet — Holland has never recorded his own music with such a broad palette. Several older pieces from his small-band recordings are here: "Shadow Dance" and "First Snow" from his first quintet album, Jumpin’ In (1984); "The Razor’s Edge" and "Blues for C.M." from The Razor’s Edge (1987); "Triple Dance" from 1988’s Triplicate; and the title track from 2001’s Not for Nuthin’. The album is completed by one new tune, "Upswing."

The easiest route Holland could have taken would have been to let the full band play the theme and then distribute solos, with section parts providing the occasional bridge sections. Instead, he’s fleshed out his material in a way that, in hindsight, seems preordained by the original tunes. The original "Triplicate" is typical Holland: an attractive zigzagging boppish melody over rhythms that shift back and forth from a funky bass ostinato to straight 4/4 swing. On the What Goes Around version, he takes the line originally played by alto-saxophonist Steve Coleman, breaks it into parts, and refracts it through the lens of the entire orchestra. Over his bass, the introductory phrases are now scored for Steve Nelson’s vibes before Gary Smulyan’s baritone sax comes in with a bluesier, more swinging reading than Coleman’s more abstract original. Smulyan’s extended solo builds over gradually rising brass figures, then breaks for a tenor solo from Chris Potter as brass and reeds continue to call and respond with various background counterlines; it all culminates in a duo between Potter and trombonist Robin Eubanks and a brief passage of full-band collective improv. Aside from his usual rhythmic derring-do, Holland exploits traditional big-band colors — creamy reed-section passages, moaning and barking brass.

The effect is of extended narratives with fresh events unfolding at every turn. The What Goes Around "Triple Dance" is only a minute or so longer than the original, but it’s been entirely reconceived. And there are plenty of other felicities, like the relaxed line "Blues for C.M.," Holland’s Mingus tribute, with Nelson’s percussive style set against the hard edge of Antonio Hart’s alto sax and a solo in which Holland matches not only Mingus’s short, breathlike phrases but also his intonation with a passage of buzzing upper-register plucking. In every piece, Holland uses his 13-piece band to create the illusion of the more conventional big-band complement of 16 or 17 pieces.

"The people that I admire," he explained to me over the phone from New York just before the start of the current tour, which was to take them all to Europe before returning to California and then the East Coast, "are the people that really use the orchestra — the jazz orchestra — in a way to explore compositional ideas and settings for improvising. I still think of it very much as setting for improvisers. But obviously we are the larger ensemble. You have greater opportunity to orchestrate and to develop compositional direction and so on. I do think of it theatrically, in terms of events, and an idea evolving and developing, like in the theater. And as I say, I’m trying to find a balance, as I have with the quintet, between having written music — which is substantial enough, in my mind, to validate the presence of the large group — and still have it feel that it is this improvisational setting, and that we are really creating vehicles for improvisational approaches."

With that in mind, Holland’s featured soloists shine in piece after piece: Nelson, Smulyan, Hart, Potter, trumpeter Alex Sipiagin, and alto-saxophonist Mark Gross, who plays some beautiful, Cannonball Adderley–like rich, bluesy lines on "First Snow." "It has given me a greater cast of characters," he says of the big band. "I didn’t want a generic-sounding band. The big bands I’ve loved are the ones that sound like a unit but in fact you could actually still recognize the individual players, so that when you listen to the sax section you can still tell who is who, even though they get this wonderful sound together. That was my goal in terms of choosing people. I wanted people that could really function in an ensemble but still have a strong individual character in their sound and approach."

What’s also impressive about What Goes Around is that aside from being the bandleader and the bass player, Holland wrote and arranged all the tunes. In the big-band business, it’s not unusual for a bandleaders to assign arrangements to others within the band, or for the composer to form a partnership with another composer/arranger, as Charlie Haden has done with Carla Bley in his Liberation Music Orchestra. Holland has played in big bands sporadically since the days of his London apprenticeship; he worked in the large groups of Sam Rivers and Anthony Braxton as well as doing occasional stints with the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra, but not for extended periods.

"It was intimidating at first," he says, "because my heroes are people like Ellington, Strayhorn, Thad Jones and Gil Evans and Kenny Wheeler. They are such masters of the genre. I approached the whole idea of writing for big band with rather a high standard for myself. But I knew it was a step I had to take, both as a composer and as a musician. To try to put the musical ideas into a larger context. But I think the small-group writing that I’ve done has kind of been leading to this point. I think the way I’ve been hearing the compositions, the composing for a small group has been increasingly lending itself to a larger setting. So it was a kind of natural evolution."

And his first step as a leader, Conference of the Birds? He recalls it too as a kind of natural evolution. He’d been working with Altschul and Braxton in the band Circle with Chick Corea, which had just broken up. When he returned to New York after touring with Circle, he and Altschul began playing with Rivers. "It seemed obvious to me that that connection — the three of us in Circle, plus the trio that was working with Sam — would be a perfect unifying thing." Rivers and Braxton, he says, "were two musicians that I really wanted to play with and join in that period — they were the ones I felt most inspired to play with."

But there was a different agenda behind the record too, since despite the presence of two other powerful composers, it was made up entirely of Holland originals. "I considered that record to be a statement of intent, really. Because at the time, in ’72, the ripples of what Miles had done in Bitches Brew and so on, the echoes of that had gone into the music business and, unfortunately, as these things do, they degraded into some fairly mundane ‘fusion’ music. I was a bit discouraged with what was going on. It wasn’t even that I felt so compelled, like, ‘I’ve gotta make a record.’ I just said I think I’d like to really make a statement about some music that I felt strongly about. A direction of music that really meant something to me, and just put it out there for people to hear. It wasn’t so much a protest or anything like that, it was just, ‘Okay, well here’s an alternative.’ "

As for the latest development in Holland’s music, he says that the Big Band is continuing to evolve. "The record was done 18 months ago. Although we’ve only done a couple of gigs with the group, every time we get together, it moves along. I want to try to keep it flexible, move the soloists around for different tunes. It’s a vehicle for the whole group of musicians. This next two months, I’m so excited to see where it’s going to go, and where we’re going to end up."

The Dave Holland Big Band — with Alex Sipiagin, Duane Eubanks, David Ballou, Robin Eubanks, Joshua Roseman, Jonathan Arons, Mark Turner, Antonio Hart, Mark Gross, Gary Smulyan, Steve Nelson, and Billy Kilson — plays the Berklee Performance Center this Friday, October 4. Call (617) 876-7777.