With the arrival of her first album in four years just months away, violinist Regina Carter had little free time during the first week of March. She’d just returned from Monterey Jazz Festival on Tour, a six-week national commitment that ran through May. She had a photo shoot scheduled the next day and a short break, before returning to the road with her own band to build momentum for the release of the album, Reverse Thread (E1 Entertainment), during May and June.

But on this morning, the Detroit-born Carter has driven into lower Manhattan for an interview at the World Music Institute, where she had purchased some of the music that inspired Reverse Thread’s East African-themed music. She recorded the new album—on which she reinterprets melodies based on the Ugandan songs “Hiwumbe Awumba” and “Mwana Talitambula” and other songs from the region—early last year at a studio near her home.

The nonprofit World Music Institute—sitting inconspicuously on the ninth floor of a high-rise on West 27th Street, between Sixth Avenue and Broadway—books acts from around the world to perform at Carnegie Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Symphony Space, Le Poisson Rouge, and other top Manhattan venues. While all of the data the Institute has collected could qualify as an archive, it’s neither organized nor accessible to the public as of yet, so actual music is less prominent than desks and telephones. Still, the Institute has a half-dozen bookcases packed with CDs for sale, a veritable treasure trove that Carter discovered after attending several concerts that the Institute had produced. The Grammy-winning jazz violinist already had decided her next project would include a kora—the traditional 21-string harp-lute instrument from West Africa—but she needed a concept, and the Institute’s store of recordings provided a valuable resource.

“I just always remembered, in the back of my mind, that it was a place to find music that you can’t necessarily find either on iTunes or at the store,” Carter says. “I tried to stay away from a lot of the contemporary music, and was trying to find more traditional, if you will, or older music, or music from places that maybe you’re not going to hear on the radio, even on Afrobeat stations.”

Laughing, she adds, “I spent major money in here. But it was so well worth it.”

After being led into one of the offices, Carter removes a long brown coat, revealing a red turtleneck. Like many performers, she looms larger onstage. In person, the violinist stands perhaps an inch or two over five feet. As expected, she’s in a hurry, but not at all harried. Smiling frequently, she appears content and admits as much.

It’s far cry from an interview I conducted with Carter in 2006 to mark the release of I’ll Be Seeing You: A Sentimental Journey (Verve). She had come across as reserved, perhaps even resigned, as workers banged outside her condo overlooking New York’s Central Park. The noise not only proved distracting, it also exacerbated a sometimes-awkward conversation focusing as much on her mother’s then-recent death as it did on Carter’s music.

I’ll Be Seeing You followed Paganini: After a Dream (Verve), a 2003 album documenting Carter’s experience of playing Niccolo Paganini’s iconic 1742 del Gesù violin, known as the “Cannon,” on several occasions between 2001 and 2003. The album sold more than 50,000 copies in the first year, confirming Carter’s status as the best-known American jazz violinist. However, 2006’s I’ll Be Seeing You, a collection of warhorses by Duke Ellington, W.C. Handy, and Rodgers and Hart, had an entirely different mission: eulogizing Carter’s mother, Grace Carter, who died of cancer in 2005. Because of Grace Carter’s illness, Regina canceled a number of overseas bookings in 2004. Resolving a subsequent lawsuit that resulted from one of those canceled performances took a great deal out of Carter, forcing her to consider whether she wanted to continue performing at all.

Since then Carter’s fortunes have changed for the better. While she still owns the Central Park condo, Carter now shares a house in northern New Jersey with her husband, Alvester Garnett, her drummer since the late 1990s. And, in 2006, Carter won a MacArthur Fellowship award, the so-called “genius grant” that includes a cash award of $500,000.

The release of Reverse Thread marks the first album Carter has produced independently after six major-label releases. “I feel like for the first time, I was able to approach a project and not have a dark cloud over me,” she says. “And because I did this record myself, I didn’t have a peanut gallery telling me what their opinions were, what I should be doing, or who I should have [on the album], or any of that.

“I’m not bitter,” she adds, laughing, but “for once I could do what I wanted to do, the way I wanted to do it.”

Reverse Thread also has rejuvenated Carter artistically. The dozen tracks encompass tunes by such well-known African musicians as Habib Koité and Boubacar Traoré and reflect influences that include field recordings of little-known Jewish musicians in Uganda—the folk recordings she first encountered at the World Music Institute. The arrangements of the uncomplicated melodies often feature an accordion player doubling Carter’s violin. Some of the tracks include electric bass grooves underneath. Garnett added cowbells and cymbals to his drum kit for this project and also a djembe, an African hand drum.

“I wanted to just strip it back down so it’s more like chamber music,” Carter says. “I wanted it to be really simple and really basic. Just beautiful melodies. And that in itself was a challenge, because you just have maybe four [chord] changes, if that. The challenge is how to work with that, and not let it become boring or monotonous.

“Most of these tunes,” she adds, “are about a vibe or about a groove.”

Violinist John Blake, Carter’s onetime mentor and the coproducer of Reverse Thread, attributes the success of the album to Carter’s vision, however different it is from her previous recordings. “She knew what kind of music she wanted to do,” says Blake, a former sideman with McCoy Tyner and Grover Washington Jr. “She knew the combination of instruments she wanted to use. For me, it was something new. Just the texture and the combinations and the way certain instruments blended together. And that kind of fascinated me.

“I think she’s growing and I think she’s experimenting with her sound,” he adds, in the context of nontraditional instruments.

Reverse Thread often highlights the lyrical aspects of the songs, which range from the moody, chamber-like “Kothbiro” to buoyant tunes like “Hiwumbe Awumba” and “Zerapiky” that recall American fiddle music. Carter, however, can bring out a visceral side onstage, as she did when I heard her perform last summer at Birdland, the well-known jazz club in midtown Manhattan. But despite the traditional influences, Carter is careful to distinguish Reverse Thread from the recordings of West African musicians. “Sometimes I worry about that,” she says. “If you take their tunes and re-record them as a jazz musician, how are they going to feel about that? You never know how people are going to feel because I’m not of their culture, I’m not of that music—I’m someone completely outside, trying to take something of theirs and present it. They have to be pleased with the outcome. That’s important for me.”

Carter, who’s in her 40s, was a self-described “Suzuki baby” who studied classical music for much of her youth in Detroit. She attended New England Conservatory of Music before transferring to Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, where she shifted her focus entirely to jazz, even adapting her violin to the saxophone section of the school’s jazz big band.

“This is what my big band teacher told me,” Carter recalls. “He said, ‘If you keep listening to the few [jazz] violinists that are out there, you’re going to sound just like them. And the world doesn’t need another Stéphane Grappelli.’”

In spite of her jazz sensibilities, Carter’s classical chops are apparent, says violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, who performed alongside Carter and violinist Eileen Ivers in 2002 in a concert program that also included the Boston Pops. “She has that [classical] training, so she has the upper hand as far as the control over the instrument,” Salerno-Sonnenberg says. “If you have that, plus you have this sense of jazz that she obviously always has had, then you have something very special.”

While the violin plays only a minor role in jazz, it is prominent overseas in the folkloric music of Africa and India. “I think, first of all, I’ve never just been drawn to or focused on ‘The Real Book,’” says Carter, referring to the various collections of song transcriptions used by jazz musicians. “I’ve always been really curious [about other music and cultures], because I’ve had friends from other places, and would hear the music in their homes. I’ve always been interested in other people, if you will, [people] very different than myself, since I was a child.

“And in traveling, I think, and hearing different sounds, different instruments, different music,” she continues, “[the experience] has always been really intriguing for me and very beautiful.”

Moreover, Carter discovered that a variation of the violin family “seems to exist in almost every musical culture on the planet. So that was really interesting to me, to hear these sounds: Oh, that sounds like a violin. But, you know, it’s not a violin.”

Reverse Thread succeeds in spotlighting the violin as a true citizen of the world, apart from jazz and even classical music. “You see pictures of [such stringed instruments], or you hear the scale system that they’re using or the mode system that they’re using,” Carter says, “or seeing how they play—it might not be under the chin, it might be just on the shoulder or it might be three strings [or] one string or it might be bowed more like a cello.

“But it’s still related.”