Like its namesake highway, high-energy Lansing  jazz ensemble 496 West is built to move people.

At a joyful, upbeat concert last Friday, July 25, a week ahead of their Saturday gig at JazzFest Michigan, 496 West filled the cavernous Everett High School auditorium with wall-to-wall sound. Rafael Leafar, a Detroit-born master of multiple instruments, tore the auditorium up with his searing tenor sax, inspiring a woman in the audience to shout, “I’m feeling it!”

The founder and guiding spirit of the band, guitarist Charlie Wilson, maintained his workmanlike demeanor in the rhythm section, but he proudly took note of the joyful response.

“Yeah, I heard that,” he said with a laugh during a phone call the morning after the show.

496 West often surprises listeners who expect a local variant of the standard smooth jazz sound. At the Everett show, Leafar spun out a passionate arc of saxophone seduction and sermonizing, punctuated by raw honks and tremulous outcries, like a congregant of the church of John Coltrane speaking in tongues.

“He’s a monster on that sax. He’s powerful,” Wilson said. “He can play like that all night. And he’s not even 30 years old.”

Later in the evening, multi-reedman Daryl Beebe, a longtime member of the group, pulled out a silvery electronic wind instrument and waded into the happy crowd, leaving grins, shouts and craned necks in his wake.

Beebe is also featured on “Maputo,” a track from the band’s latest album, “Rules of Engagement,” named for the capital of Mozambique. His solo and the band’s rich, multi-layered arrangement evoke a bustling port city, center of creativity and convergence of multiple cultures in East Africa.

Potent artillery like Leafar and Beebe enable 496 West to combine the mentholated buzz of smooth jazz with the vivid sound painting of “Maputo” and the raw power of “energy jazz” monsters like Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders.

Wilson isn’t too interested in labels like “smooth jazz” anyway.

“It’s really not elevator music, like people think it is,” he said. “It’s a combination of things. It’s upbeat, instrumental R&B with a mix of some traditional jazz in there. Really, music doesn’t need any labels, but people like to label it.”

Wilson, a native of Long Island, New York, has kept the band going through many ups, downs and changes in personnel. The group pushed itself to the utmost on Friday despite mourning the loss of longtime drummer Kenneth Robertson, who died the weekend before.

Wilson’s faith helps him forge ahead. He grew up with music in the local church, where his father was a pastor.

“He didn’t have any musicians, so he brought a bunch of instruments into the house, and my brother and I just started playing,” Wilson said. “So, I started playing in church.”

His father promoted gospel concerts and even sang in an R&B group in his younger years, so there was always music playing in the house.

“We grew up with a variety of music, and the contemporary jazz really grew on me,” Wilson said. Among his musical heroes are George Benson (“my favorite guitarist”), pianist George Duke and saxophonist Kirk Whalum. (Wilson was thrilled when Whalum joined 496 West for a concert at Everett High School two years ago.)

The idea for 496 West first came to Wilson in the mid-2000s. After playing in other bands for many years, he wanted to lead his own group. He assembled a talented roster of musicians, some of them longtime collaborators, who shared his vision. To get the big sound he wanted, he had to cast a wide net.

Saturday’s group will feature Wilson, Leafar, saxophonist Houston Patton, drummer Mark Smith and trumpeter Jeff Gregory, who hails from Plainwell and has been with the band for over five years. Gregory stepped up for a lyrical, swinging flugelhorn solo Friday night, as if paying tribute to the recently deceased Chuck Mangione, who brought the flugelhorn into every living room in the nation in 1978 with his instrumental hit “Feels So Good.”

“Jeff gives us a real big sound, which is great, especially for festivals and outdoor events,” Wilson said.

Percussionist Andres DeJesus, a 15-year veteran of the band who wields a formidable battery of tools, will also be on hand.

The group has gone through many personnel changes, including the death of its music director, Al McKenzie, in 2023. (McKenzie was also the longtime music director for the Temptations.)

Appropriately for a group named after a highway, the band does a lot of traveling to festivals and other events in the Midwest.

“There’s really not a whole lot of venues for our type of music in Lansing,” Wilson said. “We’re not a bar band, so we don’t play bars or clubs or things like that.”

Nevertheless, they’ve been busier than ever the past two months, playing festivals nearly every weekend. One of the biggest, the sprawling Jazz and Rib Fest in Columbus, Ohio, boasts 200,000 attendees swarming three stages.

In addition to leading 496 West, Wilson writes music and produced the group’s four CDs.

“Rules of Engagement,” released in 2022, bottles the band’s surging power and joyful spirit in a wide-ranging set of covers and originals. “Inner City Blues” infuses the Marvin Gaye classic with a huge sound and wall-to-wall energy. The danceable, light-hearted romp “Soul Catcher” features Gregory’s muted trumpet and pixie-light synths. In “Dilla JW,” a fat beat with a skin-on-skin feel is sandwiched between piercing, high-end synths and tumbling keyboards. (“Dilla JW” is not named for the famous hip-hop artist J Dilla, but for Wilson’s grandson, who is named after Dilla.)

On recordings or at live shows, the band transcends labels.

“Boo’d Up,” a standout track on “Rules of Engagement,” manages to brood, celebrate, dance and cry at the same time, ending in affirmative reconciliation with life, courtesy of Leafar’s eloquent sax.

“Music is meant to elevate people’s moods, relax them and bring them some excitement,” Wilson said, thinking of Friday’s show. “Like the crowd last night.”