Ravi Coltrane has hardly been resting on his laurels since 2012’s “Spirit Fiction,” his last studio album as a bandleader.

Since that record’s release, the soft-spoken jazz saxophonist — and son of jazz luminaries John and Alice Coltrane — has assembled a new quartet featuring pianist Glenn Zaleski, bassist Dezron Douglas and drummer Johnathan Blake that has toured extensively around the world. He’s also kept up a busy touring and recording schedule as a sideman with artists such as guitarist Tisziji Muñoz and drummer/pianist Jack DeJohnette. Most recently, his work with DeJohnette and bassist Matthew Garrison on the 2016 trio album “In Movement” — in particular the title track’s soaring horn solo — earned him a Grammy nomination for best improvised jazz solo.

Even as Coltrane has forged ahead with new music, he’s remained silent on the solo-album front, with the five years since his sixth album being the longest interval between records yet. It’s not that he hasn’t wanted to release something new — “It’s like that carrot on the stick; you’re constantly going after it but not often catching up to it,” he said in a recent interview with GO! Magazine. But the pull of performing live and the ever-changing music industry have given him pause.

“I’ll say it’s less fun when everyone makes records now. You know, it’s not the same industry,” Coltrane said from his home in Brooklyn, one day before heading to the West Coast for a tour that will bring him to the Riverhouse on the Deschutes to close out the inaugural Riverhouse Jazz series Friday and Saturday.

“… When literally every musician has a record — whether they just got out of school, whether they’re still in school, whether they’re known, whether they’re not known — it’s a very different playing field. And for me, it’s like, well, there’s billions of records out here, I don’t need to make a record. … I don’t want to take away or discourage the idea that — or to imply the idea that that’s negative. People have to do what they got to do, and there’s musicians who have a lot to say musically; there’s some great, great music that’s being put out. But it’s like a huge, huge ocean, and it used to be like a small pond.”

At this point, given Coltrane’s love of performing, a live album seems a more likely proposition.

“There’s really only one spot that I’d want to record live, and that’s the Village Vanguard (in Greenwich Village, New York City),” he said. “It’s historically such an important space for documenting live recordings, and sonically it’s a beautiful-sounding room and perfect for recording actually: The amount of dryness versus reverberation in that space, it’s perfect for live recording. I think I’m gonna record this year, and I did record a few years ago. So yeah, who knows? Someday.”

In the meantime, Coltrane and his quartet continue to forge ahead with new music live. The Bend shows will focus heavily on original songs, Coltrane said, with a few standards — the group has been working on some of pianist Thelonious Monk’s compositions.

“Everyone in the band has been contributing music, so that’s another weight off my shoulders,” Coltrane said. “… We’ll probably get into a little bit of free improvisation and things like that. But yeah, we’re still kind of exploring the repertoire we’ve been playing over the last few years.”

In Bend, the quartet will be joined by trumpeter and longtime Coltrane friend Ralph Alessi. The two have remained close for at least 30 years, ever since attending music school together at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles in the ’80s.

Like his father, Coltrane is known for working with quartets, but he shook things up on “Spirit Fiction,” working in a quartet and a quintet. He said he enjoys the musical freedom a quintet allows him.

“For the leader of the band, for the saxophonist, you get a break a little more often so another guy can solo,” he said. “But also, the interplay between the horns can be — it can sort of elicit another energy from the band. When the band is backing up one horn player, it’s one kind of sound and one kind of focus, one kind of energy, but when there’s kind of a dialogue happening in front of the band, I think it frees the rhythm section up in a lot of different ways.”

DeJohnette and Garrison are also old friends. Garrison is the son of bassist Jimmy Garrison, who played with John Coltrane in his “classic quartet” in the ’60s. And Coltrane calls DeJohnette a “father figure” to himself and the younger Garrison.

“That family connection is there; it’s been there for a long time,” Coltrane said. “I feel like Matt is a brother to me — I won’t say a little brother even though he’s younger than me, but he’s been a pretty accomplished student on his own and definitely no longer a young kid or anything. And Jack is like Papa Jack. It’s been great to work with them, and also musically it’s been just a real learning experience.”

Throughout his career, Coltrane has sought his own path on the saxophone, and has developed a style that stands apart from his famous father. He’s worked with McCoy Tyner, Carlos Santana, Charlie Haden, M-Base proponent Steve Coleman and drummer Elvin Jones (another John Coltrane Quartet veteran).

John Coltrane died of liver cancer in 1967, when Ravi was almost 2; the younger Coltrane was raised by his mother, pianist/composer/singer Alice. Though he picked up clarinet in high school, he was initially attracted to film and photography, a passion that continues to this day.

“I started taking pictures very young. My mother always had cameras, movie cameras, film cameras, so I was making little Super 8 movies when I was in elementary school, you know, with the editor and cutting, splicing things together, playing SWAT on the roof with little toy machine guns, jumping through bushes and chasing people — it was high film art there,” Coltrane said. “… After high school, I felt like I wanted to go to USC (University of Southern California) to study film, and AFI (American Film Institute) had a program, I wanted to go there. And it was kind of right around the time that jazz music started to hit my ear a little bit more directly, and it just started pulling me in that direction, the direction of being a player, being a musician.”

Growing up, the John Coltrane connection didn’t affect Ravi that much: “I didn’t grow up the son of John Coltrane, I grew up as Ravi.” At music school, and later on in New York City, Coltrane’s name started earning him attention.

“I totally understood it — it’s like if Miles Davis’ son showed up with a trumpet. I’d have the same reaction, everyone would,” Coltrane said. “But it was something that I kind of learned to manage before I got to New York, while I was still in school. I went to school to basically really learn the foundations of improvised music. I could barely play at all when I got to CalArts. That, on top of my name being Ravi Coltrane, it was very distracting for people. But I got comfortable sort of letting people know who I was, where I was coming from and what I was trying to do, and people slowly but surely could see that my goals weren’t that different from their own.”

“I’ll say it’s less fun when everyone makes records now. You know, it’s not the same industry. … When literally every musician has a record — whether they just got out of school, whether they’re still in school, whether they’re known, whether they’re not known — it’s a very different playing field. … There’s some great, great music that’s being put out. But it’s like a huge, huge ocean, and it used to be like a small pond.”— Ravi Coltrane

What: Ravi Coltrane Quintet, with Innovation Project

When: 6:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, doors open at 6 p.m.

Where: Riverhouse Jazz, Riverhouse on the Deschutes, 3075 NE Third St., Bend

Cost: $60 plus fees

Contact: riverhouse.com/jazz or 866-453-4480