The first noise that one hears at an Ornette Coleman performance inevitably resembles the sound of a waiter falling down a flight of stairs with a tray of dishes. But after that initial crash, one quickly realizes that the other musicians — the bass and drums — are falling in perfect synchronization. Soon it becomes clear that the whole band is in a perfectly coordinated free flight, producing one of the most glorious sounds you’ve ever heard. As they say in “Toy Story,” there’s little appreciable difference between flying and “falling with style.”

Just a few weeks after his 78th birthday and the 50th anniversary of his first album, Mr. Coleman took to the stage at Town Hall (the site of his landmark concert in 1962) for his first New York appearance in two years. Mr. Coleman said something to the filled house, but since his speaking microphone apparently wasn’t turned on, nobody heard what it was; thankfully, this was the only sound problem of the night. Compared with his last three shows for JVC at Carnegie Hall, where the acoustics remain a sonic nightmare, I felt as though I was truly hearing his current quartet — the two-bass band — for the first time. And the leader was apparently confident enough with the acoustics to be able to play with the visuals: He was wearing a bright kelly green checkerboard suit (in stark contrast to his white lacquer alto), the sort of thing that Ricky Ricardo would wear on St. Patrick’s Day.

In the five years or so that Mr. Coleman has been working with the multiple-bass band, he’s tried numerous variations: The first edition employed two acoustic basses (the jazz player Greg Cohen and the more classically inclined Tony Falanga). Then, in 2006 at Carnegie, he added a third bassist, the electric player Al MacDowell (known to us through Mr. Coleman’s electrified band, Prime Time). Friday’s lineup at Town Hall consisted of two basses (Mr. Falanga, playing lots of arco, and Mr. MacDowell) and the two Colemans (Ornette, playing mostly alto saxophone but switching to trumpet and violin when the spirit moved him, and his son, Denardo, on drums).

The slightly different format and improved acoustics gave the leader’s playing a whole new sound. At Carnegie, his saxophone struck me as slithery and serpentine; here, it was more punchy and aggressive. Though the alto timbre seemed slightly out of tune on the first few numbers, as both the band and the horn warmed up and the ear became acclimated, Mr. Coleman sounded great soon enough. As the performance progressed, he came closer than ever to the goal of making his instruments sound like a human voice — crying, laughing, and screaming.

Mr. Coleman once said in an interview that the bass represents to him the entire tradition of great European string music, which is why he chose white players (Scott LaFaro and Charlie Haden, to name two) in his early groups. Mr. Coleman has a classical side, expressed in his formal and longform works, and in the playing of Mr. Falanga; he also has a pop side, which comes to the fore in Prime Time and is represented in the current band by Mr. MacDowell. Mr. Coleman is an innovator (although, since his music is as far-out as ever, maybe we should call him an “out-ovator”) of jazz improvisation, which makes it unsurprising that his musicians never improvise in the usual way. Rather than mapping out an order of solos, every number features all four players all the time, following Mr. Coleman’s lead, with occasional interludes for the bassists. One number on Friday featured a Mozartian line, bowed by Mr. Falanga, while Denardo Coleman banged out a rock ‘n’ roll-style “power” rhythm and his father did his own thing up front. It all made perfect musical sense. As ever, Mr. Coleman plays in a steady metrical pulse (no out-of-time playing here), and every tune is compositionally directed with an unmistakable beginning, middle, and end.

In that sense, Mr. MacDowell was a hero of the evening, supplying traditional melodic and harmonic accompaniment for the leader’s solos without bowing to the conventions of jazz bass playing. Throughout the evening, he played his instrument not like a traditional Fender bass, but more like a unique, amplified, fourstring guitar-bass hybrid of his own invention.

For his own part, Mr. Coleman’s most recognized link to convention has always been his inclusion of the blues, or something very much like it. On Friday, he included a blues piece that was originally titled “Turnabout” (on his second album, 1959’s “Tomorrow Is the Question!”), but is now called “Turnaround” (as on his most recent album, 2005’s “Sound Grammar”). Thanks at least in part to the encouragement of Mr. MacDowell, Mr. Coleman also included several numbers that could almost be described as ballads. One of his most celebrated innovations was his reinvention of the dirge, a melancholy lament not heard much in jazz since New Orleans funerals. His best-known dirge, “Lonely Woman,” has become a jazz standard. On Friday, he saved it for the encore. But with Mr. MacDowell supplying guitaresque filigrees behind him, Mr. Coleman played several tunes in a way that could only be described as lyrical and even romantic — Ornette for lovers.

There were other pieces that sounded like classical etudes (one was a dead ringer for Robert Schumann’s “Traumeri”), folk songs (one suggesting, in Gary Giddins’s famous phrase, a harmolodic hoedown), calypsos (there was a paraphrase from “Day O”), and mambos. Some even sounded like funk tunes, with Denardo supplying a heavy backbeat.

In terms of his musical evolution, this is a particularly rich period for Mr. Coleman, which made this concert the most enjoyable of his I’ve ever attended: He was riveting on every single number, playing with the same kind of enormous energy that one associates with his fellow 1930-born saxophone colossus, Sonny Rollins. His current band is the perfect mix of every genre out there as well as every phase of his own continuing musical maturation. And though he never repeats anything, he always sounds consistently like himself. For music that some have labeled inaccessible, it yields its pleasures with remarkable ease.

wfriedwald@nysun.com