About two years ago, I found myself seated at a concert next to a fellow fan and writer, one who exemplified the breed once known as a “moldy fig” – someone who can’t abide the direction music took after World War II and decries all contemporary players. “Surely, there’s at least one young musician you like?” He thought for a second and said: “Kenny Barron.”

Considering that Kenny Barron was turning 60 in 2003, it must have been a while since anyone had described him as a young, cutting-edge keyboard hotshot. Yet the moldy fig had a point in a certain sense: Mr. Barron plays with so much energy and imagination it’s hard to think of him as someone nearing retirement age, and it’s only been about 10 years since he became a star.

Mr. Barron, after 35 years on the scene, enjoyed his first longtime relationship with a major label in the early 1990s.The series of albums he headlined for Verve – including “Spirit Song,” “Freefall” and “Things Unseen” – represent some of the finest jazz to be recorded in that very busy decade. Starting today he will begin a three-week festival at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, in which he will lead half a dozen different lineups.

Mr. Barron’s story is characteristic of jazz piano in the contemporary era. While the postwar years were dominated by colossuses like Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, and Bill Evans, the best jazz piano of the last 25 years has been the work of incredible craftsmen who previously were hidden in plain sight – most notably Hank Jones, Barry Harris, the late Tommy Flanagan, and Kenny Barron.

For most of their careers, these men were somewhat taken for granted, regarded as great musicians and the first guys you would call if you were doing a record date. But they were never given the star treatment. Now, they’re getting their due.

Born in Philadelphia in 1943, Mr. Barron is the younger brother of another perennially underappreciated musician, the tenor saxophonist Bill Barron (1927-89), a contemporary and colleague of John Coltrane. Mr. Barron, 16 years younger, played in R&B bands around Pennsylvania before he moved to New York at age 18, and he made his debut record appearance on his brother’s 1961 “Modern Windows Suite.”

Even when Mr. Barron was barely known beyond the jazz world, he was one of the most recorded musicians in it – the new edition of Tom Lord’s “Jazz Discography” lists more than 450 sessions with Mr. Barron playing every kind of keyboard variation imaginable. He established himself among the bebop elite when he began working with the two most prominent boppers of the 1960s, James Moody and Dizzy Gillespie, and recorded and toured extensively with both of them.

Mr. Barron played with Mr. Moody on “Another Bag” (1962), “Comin’ On Strong” (1963), and “Moody and the Brass Figures” (1966), among others, and with Gillespie on a particularly exciting series of albums from the mid-1960s that generally also costarred Mr. Moody. The Dizzy recordings ranged from straight-ahead bop (as on a 1965 Carnegie Hall concert) to several memorably goofy excursions to the calypso islands (“Jambo Caribe”) and tinsel town (“Dizzy in Hollywood,” “The Cool World”).

Mr. Barron recorded his first album as a leader in 1973 (“Sunset at Dawn” on Muse). But he first started to be recognized in his own right a decade later when he began an intense collaboration with Stan Getz, a tenor colossus of roughly the same years as his older brother. Mr. Barron was the perfect partner for the great tenor’s final years: Getz had both mellowed and matured in his early 60s, without having lost any of his youthful fire, and Mr. Barron both supported and challenged him.

The two made five official albums in the five years they worked together before the tenorist’s death in 1991 – although more previously unissued concerts (and one exceptional studio album, “Bossas and Ballads”) continue to be released. “People Time,” a set of duets, was the most remarkable, perhaps because it was as much a Kenny Barron album as it was a Stan Getz album.

By the early 1990s, Mr. Barron was dividing his musical interests in three ways. First, he was getting more pan-African, as he showed in the 1995 “Swamp Sally,” a disc of duets with the Martinique-born percussionist Mino Cinelu (who is co-starring with him until Sunday). At the same time, Mr. Barron was also getting more European. He was at the center of the Classical Jazz Quartet, a group even more intent on combining bebop with baroque than The Modern Jazz Quartet, using the same instrumentation of piano, vibes (Stefon Harris), bass (Ron Carter), and drums (Lewis Nash).

On “The Classical Jazz Quartet Plays Bach,” their approach to the merger was relatively straightforward. They improvised over and swung six Bach opuses in a way that was simultaneously fun and tasteful. Mr. Barron’s most recent quintet, which again featured Mr. Harris on vibes alongside flautist Anne Shelton, employed some of the same semi-classical techniques (as heard on Mr. Barron’s most recent album, “Images,” Sunnyside 3021).

Yet most fans would agree that Mr. Barron’s best music reflects his upbringing in bebop, particularly 1995’s “Things Unseen” (Verve 314-537315) and 1999’s “Spirit Song” (Verve 314-543180), which both feature the fine trumpeter Eddie Henderson (who will be part of Mr. Barron’s sextet next week at the DCCC). The former opens with an atmospheric, extended piece of swamp bop named after “Marie LaVeau” of New Orleans folklore. The latter leads off with “The Pelican,” a memorable bop line that shows why Mr. Barron’s tunes are increasingly being played by other bands (the ultimate test of mettle for a jazz composer).

Finally, there’s “Freefall,” Mr. Barron’s 2000 meeting with violinist Regina Carter (he plays on her 1998 “Rhythms of the Heart”) is an exciting example of everything jelling beautifully in the studio. Ms. Carter is not a world-class improviser, but she has imagination and chutzpah. “Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise” combines every strain of Mr. Barron’s music; he lays down a Cuban montuno pattern as she gives the swing treatment to this operetta-derived standard. Thelonious Monk’s “Mysterioso,” which opens with Mr. Barron laying down the essential three-note melody pattern while Ms. Carter accompanies him – before they reverse roles – is a wonderful example of their antic wit. I have no doubt that Monk himself would have dug it.

Until April 10 (1 Columbus Circle, 212-258-9595).