While a certain Chicago politician comes ashore in a little over a week, an ambassador from that other great Chicago institution, its jazz scene, will have already made landfall; the legendary Ramsey Lewis performs at the Martha’s Vineyard Performing Arts Center this Sunday.

Mr. Lewis has just finished composing Colors: the Ecology of Oneness, a piece commissioned for a performance in Tokyo in September. He says he may test some of the new material on his audience at Oak Bluffs.

“It has to do with the interdependence of man here on the mothership,” said the pianist in a telephone interview on Monday this week, still conversational in the vernacular of cosmic mysticism that saturated the jazz of the 1960s and 1970s.

It’s been years since Mr. Lewis has performed on the Vineyard and he is eager to return.

“I’m looking forward to communicating musically and culturally with the people of the Island,” he said, his manner as smooth as the jazz he has been creating over a storied career that spans six decades.

For a live concert it’s difficult to imagine a better ticket than Mr. Lewis, who has earned the moniker The Great Performer from his peers. He discussed the uniquely instructive quality of giving a live performance.

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“It’s not until you perform in front of people can you really learn to hit your stride,” he said, “and find out whether you are communicating.”

The Great Performer has recently revitalized his career with forays into major works for ballet and other longer-form compositions.

“I’ve discovered a new life,” he declared.

In his former life Mr. Lewis was a conjurer of urbane jazz standards, penning such crossover hits as The In-Crowd and Sun Goddess. His new life began in 2006 when the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago commissioned a piece for their dance To Know Her. At first Mr. Lewis, who is trained in classical music, was flummoxed by the task.

“I’d never written for a ballet and the challenges were getting past my impressions of Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky and the other great ballet composers,” he said.

“It’s interesting, when I first started out I was 16 years old and my band was a dance band,” Mr. Lewis said, “So when the Joffrey said, okay write music for us to dance to, I was like, whoa. For several weeks I was bumping my head coming up with music that didn’t make sense. One day my wife said, ‘I feel your pain, I know what you’re going through,’ and she suggested that I just wipe the slate clean and turn on a tape recorder, sit down at a piano and start playing,”

Mr. Lewis followed his wife’s advice and within a day or two, he says, he found intriguing musical ideas buried in the hours of recordings.

“Ultimately,” Mr. Lewis said, “I didn’t have to use the tape recorder, opening myself to all there is, capital A, in the universe, capital U.”

“Some people refer to all there is as God. I know that I tapped into a creative vein that is still running through me full force to this day.”

Following the success of the Joffrey performance Mr. Lewis was commissioned by the renowned Ravinia Festival in Chicago to compose an evening’s worth of music to commemorate the 200th birthday of Abraham Lincoln. The piece was called A Proclamation of Hope and explored the links between President Lincoln and President Obama.

Of the impending presidential summer vacation on the Vineyard, though, Mr. Lewis sounded a note of mock frustration.

“He’s using up all the hotel rooms on the Island,” he said, laughing. “I only have one bodyguard; it’s my wife. He happens to have 150.”

Although his recent work marks a departure from his days as a studio musician, Mr. Lewis says his work will be forever grounded in the rudiments of jazz. While the new compositions are longer and more involved, they still leave room for improvisation and soloing.

“The unique thing about jazz is the need for improvisation, the need to make the music live,” he said. “No matter what you write, the music doesn’t jump off the page until you start soloing.”

Mr. Lewis fears that, although there is a resurgence of interest in jazz and classical music among younger musicians, they have fewer outlets for their creativity than in his day when Chicago streets were lined with freewheeling jazz clubs.

“I’ve always felt that the future of any movement, of any art, of any society is dependent on how well we educate our youth — how much we expose our youth to what I call the meat and potatoes of one’s soul.”

To that end Mr. Lewis helped develop the Ravinia Festival’s jazz mentor program which pairs prominent local musicians with Chicago area schools.

“It’s great that they should be physically fit, it’s great that they should be intellectually alert but I think there’s more to life than that, and that is one’s inner being,” he said.

“How do you feed the inner being? Well, the best way, I think, is through the arts.”

Ramsey Lewis plays Sunday at 7:30 p.m. at the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School Performing Arts Center. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. The event is a benefit for the Friends of Oak Bluffs and the Animal Shelter of Martha’s Vineyard. Tickets range from $50 to $200 and are available at Conroy’s Apothecary in West Tisbury, Our Market and daRosa’s in Oak Bluffs, Aboveground Records in Edgartown and Bunch of Grapes Bookstore in Vineyard Haven, or at islandliveentertainment.com.