It’s easy to see why Jason Moran, who is appearing this week at the Blue Note (as half the bill with the equally highly recommended trio the Bad Plus) is one of the few younger “avant-garde” musicians who have attained the upper echelon. The 31-year-old pianist and composer, who released “Artist In Residence,”his seventh album for Blue Note, has been able to keep a regularly working trio together (called Bandwagon, with Tarus Mateen on bass, and Nasheet Waits on drums), which is both a luxury and a necessity in the jazz world.

While Mr. Moran is undisputably about as modern — or, depending on the terminology, cutting-edge or avantgarde — as you can get, he also makes music that is essentially accessible. He achieves the rare balancing act of pushing the envelope while remaining in what could be called the communal comfort zone. His music is, for the most part, melodic, and his tunes aren’t difficult to follow.When he occasionally uses dissonance, he does so in the time-honored fashion, using jarring sounds as a way of conveying confusion and the sense of something gone askew. He does not, unlike many postmodernists, use distortion as a language unto itself.

On Tuesday, the key piece in the late set was “Artists Ought To Be Writing,” which, as it turns out, is not cryptically titled. Mr. Moran has long made a practice of working with prerecorded sound “samples,” although in a completely different way from rappers and hip-hoppers. On “Ringing My Phone” (from his 2003 album, “The Bandwagon”), he and the trio improvised around a recording of a telephone conversation in Turkish. In that instance, the point was to play with the pure sonics of the sound sample.

On “Artists,” he goes below the surface to address the issues raised in a discussion by a friend, the philosopher and “radical conceptual artist”Adrian Piper. In a prerecorded track played on a minidisc, Ms. Piper explained that creative people should be talking more about the creative process, and as she spoke, Bandwagon didn’t so much address the sound of her voice as improvise the music that her ideas suggested.

The climax of the show at the Blue Note was what could be called a refracted version of the jazz standard “Get Happy.” Mr. Moran took a skittering line and led it into a dark, almost militant treatment of the Harold Arlen melody, a rapid-fire rumination in which he seemed to leave the tune, the chords, and even the idea of getting happy behind as he squeezed the song through both a contemporary classical and stride piano treatment.

On the album, he plays “Arizona Landscape,” in which he cites the influence of stride master Willie “The Lion” Smith, but also brings into the picture the galloping beat frequently used to underscore Western movies. In doing so, Mr. Moran seems to suggest that the piano professors of Smith’s day were like gunslingers in the old West — that’s how “The Lion” got his name. At the Blue Note, Mr. Moran afforded a similar treatment to Henry Mancini’s “Moon River,” explaining that he had just reviewed the movie “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and thus was playing it more like movie background music than as a pop standard — once again refracting the melody and bringing it back in unexpected ways.

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Everything you need to know about the jazz-pop crooner Jack Jones, who has just started a two-week run at the Oak Room, could be summed up in his first three numbers Tuesday night. He came on with a somewhat stoic, selfcongratulatory anthem of the “My Way” era entitled “I Am A Singer” — I could have lived without it, but he certainly sang it like he meant it. Then there was another statement concerning the place of art in society, “Gypsies, Jugglers, and Clowns,” which also could have been taken as sanctimonious if Mr. Jones hadn’t sung it in a swinging blues groove that afforded it more meaning than if he had done it straight.The third tune was Lionel Bart’s “Where Is Love” (from “Oliver”), for which Mr. Jones shifted to a completely different approach, somehow managing to capture the childlike innocence of the text in a sophisticated, almost exhibitionistic framework.

Mr. Jones is amazingly hip musically, and continually does things one would never expect, like put the classicallybased show tune “Stranger In Paradise” into jazz time and revamping his early hit, “Wives and Lovers” into a modal waltz that sounded more like it was composed by Bill Evans than Burt Bacharach. He takes tunes that were written in common time and transforms them into waltzes — and vice versa.

But all this musical sleight-of-hand rarely detracts from the way he communicates a lyric, particularly on his heartfelt songs of love and loss, like Michel Legrand’s little-known “One Day at A Time,” or Cy Coleman’s “It Amazes Me.”Without digging too deep, one can enjoy Mr. Jones on just a surface level; just listen to those amazing chops and that remarkable voice, effortlessly hitting notes, sometimes even without accompaniment, that other singers couldn’t find with a metal detector and a seeing-eye dog.

wfriedwald@nysun.com