In recent seasons I have been inclined to forgive Bobby Short a little hoarseness or rustiness on opening night – he is, after all, now 80. But I have never heard him sound more powerful than when he opened at the Cafe Carlyle on Tuesday, and I have never witnessed his voice and personality more vividly filling every nook and cranny of the place – not to mention every heart in the joint. The next day, listening to Bobby Short albums from 30 and 40 years ago, I could scarcely detect any deterioration in his voice or shortage of power.

Mr. Short, who obviously takes great care of his chops, seems to find inspiration in the Cafe’s well-appointed audiences, and in the musicians in his own eight-piece miniature orchestra, led by alto saxophonist and arranger Loren Schoenberg. In fact, the opening set started on the tardy side because trumpeter Virgil Jones had been delayed in traffic, and the first number was an instrumental, “Things Ain’t What They Used To Be,” which Duke Ellington had usually used as his closer.

We heard the band playing, and then, in the middle of the alto solo, there he was. Without saying a word he swung into lesser-known Gershwin and Johnny Mercer. “Oh Gee! Oh Joy!,” a George and Ira (and P. G. Wodehouse) opus from “Rosalie,” into which he folded snatches from “S’Wonderful” and “Someone To Watch Over Me.” From there, it was “San Souci,” a French Quarter confection of a dance sung in “Top Banana” by Rose Marie, with both words and music by Mercer. Were anyone else to sing this song, it would sound hopelessly jejune.

In Bobby Short’s musical universe, Noel Coward and Louis Armstrong are perfectly compatible musical bedfellows. He showed this with a medley of “Play, Orchestra, Play” and “Swing That Music,” both of which (he informed us) are songs that take the form of a command. I’ve heard Irving Berlin’s “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” and the Gershwins’ “Shall We Dance” too many times to mention, but Mr. Short makes me hear things in these songs I’ve never heard before. Both are escapist fantasies given rise by the Great Depression, but Mr. Short made me realize they are not about avoiding trouble but confronting it.

Like the late Mel Torme, Mr. Short is a master at artfully juxtaposing one song with another, if not in medleys then consecutively. It makes perfect sense to follow Harold Arlen’s “Down With Love” with the same composer’s “Hooray for Love,” giving the latter something of a French martial swing. Here and elsewhere, Mr. Short shows that he is more than capable of making you feel that he’s dancing even while he’s sitting at the piano.

He starts to play “Brahms’s Lullaby,” and makes faces like he’s falling asleep at the keyboard. But a blast from drummer Klaus Suonsaari launches him into Rodgers and Hart’s zesty “Baby’s Awake Now.” He also treats us to a second Ellington instrumental, “Ring Dem Bells,” which climaxes in a Short scat solo he enjoys so much that – as is his custom – he induces the band to play it a second time so he can scat all over again.

In the tradition of the great Broadway musicals, Bobby Short likes to climax his sets with an “eleven o’clock number.” Lately, he’s been doing funky tunes like “Empty Bed Blues” in this spot, but this fall he’s capping the show with Cole Porter’s “Can Can,” which has about a zillion verses, each wittier than the last.

The only thing that could follow it is his low-key, simple, and sincere reading of Victor Young and Sam Lewis’s “Street of Dreams.” He rushes the verse to give it a more dramatic and mysterious quality, as if he had to speak quickly for fear of being overheard. He relaxes in the chorus, where he seems to be singing legato and staccato all at once. Then he ritards for the last eight bars,looking out into space as if he were staring into eternity.