There’s a calmly heartbreaking moment near the close of “Beautiful Life,” a poignant new album by the saxophonist Jimmy Greene. It arrives in “Little Voices,” an original poem read by the actress Anika Noni Rose. “All those precious little voices,” she says over a fluttery gospel groove. “Brightening our day, stealing our hearts, shaping our lives.” Then: “In the blink of an eye, they’re gone. Now there’s just silence where those little voices used to be.”

The context behind these words is wrenchingly clear. Mr. Greene, a substantial figure in the modern jazz mainstream, was among the parents who lost a child in the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Conn. His daughter, Ana Márquez-Greene, was 6.

“Beautiful Life,” out this week on Mack Avenue, is his attempt to reclaim her memory from the grip of tragedy. “Much attention has been paid to the way in which my precious Ana died,” he writes in the liner notes, “but this album attempts to paint the picture of how she lived — lovingly, faithfully and joyfully.” Featuring an array of notable singers and instrumentalists with ties to the Greene family, the album wears its purpose plainly. Its opening track segues from a ruminative duet between Mr. Greene and the guitarist Pat Metheny, playing “Come, Thou Almighty King,” to an audio clip of Ana singing that hymn at home with her older brother, Isaiah, on piano.

What possible evaluative response can there be to a work of art so painfully personal, so inexorably shaped by calamity?