Unlike most “lost” posthumous jazz albums, “Grande-Terre,” a release from trumpeter Roy Hargrove and his bebop-goes-Havana band Crisol that arrived Friday, is no live recording, rehearsal tape or leftover session scraps best suited to die-hard fans. The LP, recorded in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, in 1998 as a sequel to “Habana” from the previous year, is an ambitious, studio-recorded, global jazz party, sun-kissed and island-hopping.

Alto saxophonist Sherman Irby, currently in the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, felt a relieved surprise when he recently heard the album for the first time, at a listening party hosted by Aida Brandes-Hargrove, Hargrove’s widow and the co-founder of Hargrove Legacy, LLC. “We were tighter than I thought we were!” he said with a laugh.

On “Priorities,” Hargrove’s rousing playing shimmers atop mesmeric Caribbean grooves laid down by four percussionists and two pianists. The album’s ballads are as tender as lovers’ whispers, while sprees like “Afreaka,” a tune by Cedar Walton, swing with such abandon, it feels like the band might spin out of control. It never does, of course, but the very possibility is part of the exhilaration of the high-wire, from-the-gut jazz Hargrove played most nights of his life.

Nobody at Verve Records or in Hargrove’s orbit can say precisely why “Grande-Terre” was shelved until Brandes-Hargrove contacted Verve about the sessions in mid-2022. The answer is probably a matter of abundance. “You can only release so many albums at a time,” Brandes-Hargrove said in an interview, and in the late 1990s Hargrove was restlessly productive, planning an album with strings (“Moment to Moment,” from 2000), getting his big band up and running, helping found the nonprofit performance venue the Jazz Gallery, being a father. The “Grande-Terre” blissout “Kamala’s Dance” is named for his daughter, born in 1997.

Brandes-Hargrove has overseen two other posthumous Hargrove releases: “In Harmony,” collecting 2016 and 2017 duo performances with pianist Mulgrew Miller, and “The Love Suite: In Mahogany,” Hargrove’s first piece written for a large ensemble. Hargrove was only 23 when he premiered “The Love Suite” at Jazz at Lincoln Center in 1993, less than seven years after Wynton Marsalis heard him play as a student at Dallas’ Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts and invited him to sit in at a gig that weekend.

Hargrove, who died at age 49 on Nov. 2, 2018, of cardiac arrest related to a kidney disease that he had endured for decades, was an ebullient virtuoso with killer chops and soul to burn. He sometimes explored the boundaries of the genre: see his turn-of-the-century work with the Soulquarians, the informal group most famously heard on D’Angelo’s 2000 “Voodoo” album, featuring Questlove, J Dilla, and Hargrove’s high-school classmate Erykah Badu, among others.

But his home was always jazz. “Roy played jazz how it should be played, meaning anybody can relate to it,” said Willie Jones III, a drummer and bandleader who played on “Grande-Terre,” worked in Hargrove’s bands for eight years and performs in the recently revived Roy Hargrove Big Band. “He’s part of the hip-hop generation, so that energy is in him. We had R&B and hip-hop musicians coming to our gigs to watch and to sit in, and Roy was reaching them with jazz music.”

Hargrove’s impact on the world of New York jazz is still being felt. He’s missed at the late-night jam sessions he haunted, where he would dazzle, mentor and challenge young players, trying to create something like the intergenerational community of musicians he enjoyed in the 1990s at the long-gone Bradley’s saloon on University Place. “We’d be on the road for four weeks, and then the night we get back he’d be at Smalls at 1 a.m. schooling young musicians on the right changes on some ballad,” Jones said.

Rio Sakari, the longtime artistic director of the Jazz Gallery, said, “I think a lot of people took him for granted because he was ubiquitous.”

Hargrove’s personal manager, Dale Fitzgerald, helped found the Jazz Gallery with Hargrove and vocalist Lezlie Harrison in 1995. Part of the impetus: a home for Hargrove’s big band. Verve paid the rent, and the venue hosted a show most weeks. Things picked up once Sakari, who started as a volunteer ticket-taker but soon was making recommendations about who to book, became artistic director and director of programming in 2000. (She recalled saying, “Hey, this guy Vijay Iyer sounds really good — we should give him a gig!”) “Roy was a handful,” Sakari said with a laugh, “and Dale didn’t have time to manage him and the Gallery.”

Hargrove, though, had time for the club, lending his celebrity and horn to fundraising events and appearing at concerts with promising young players still building an audience. “We all looked up to him,” trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire said in 2020. “A few times, when I had gigs at the Jazz Gallery, I would see Roy’s shadow in the back and we would often end up in a trumpet battle. And, when we did, he would kick my ass.”

Hargrove’s shadow is still kicking at the Jazz Gallery, now at 27th and Broadway and on the cusp of its 30th anniversary. For the past two years, a reconstituted Roy Hargrove Big Band — managed by Brandes-Hargrove and led by alto saxophonist Bruce Williams — has blown the roof off the place the first Thursday of most months, with one more performance in its 2024 residency slated for Nov. 7. (They’ll be back in 2025.)

There will be even more Hargrove music in New York soon. At this January’s Winter Jazz Festival, members of Crisol will reunite to play tunes from “Grande-Terre.” Brandes-Hargrove continues the Hargrove Legacy project of evaluating unreleased material and mining arrangements for the Big Band from notes and recordings Hargrove left behind.

She is also putting together repertoire for a reconstituted Roy Hargrove quintet, a challenge since, as Jones noted, “Roy didn’t use charts.” Tunes were cooked up at soundcheck and worked out, night after night, on the bandstand, rarely written down. The music was in him — but that doesn’t mean it won’t come out again.