Wynton Marsalis has at least one thing in common with the late Duke Ellington: Whenever any musician works with him, the association immediately shoots to the top of that musician’s résumé. Two prominent Wyntonites — the pianist Marcus Roberts and the trombonist Wycliffe Gordon — were heard in concert in town this weekend, both in bands and settings that were, to a degree, Wynton-centric.

When Mr. Roberts joined Mr. Marsalis’s quintet in 1985, he captured the imagination of the jazz world as a rare mainstream player whose central inspirations were Ellington and Thelonious Monk (rather than Bud Powell or Bill Evans) as well as the great pianists of New Orleans and the Eastern Stride school (rather than the boppers and postmodernists). On Friday and Saturday at the Allen Room, Mr. Roberts gave four performances of his “blues suite” titled “Deep in the Shed,” originally composed and recorded in 1989 as his second album.

“Shed” is a symmetrical work, utilizing nine players — three rhythm (Mr. Roberts and his regular rhythm section, the bassist Roland Guerin and drummer Jason Marsalis), three reeds (one alto and two tenor saxophones), and three brass (one trombone and two trumpets). The piece is divided into six movements — all of which, as Mr. Roberts announced from the stage, are in some variant of blues form (if not strictly the traditional 12-bar structure) — and takes us, at one point or another, through all 12 keys.

It’s not a classic extended work to compare with the composer’s heroes — Ellington and Gershwin (or the more contemporary Gerald Wilson or Maria Schneider) — but it is the sort of piece that Mr. Marsalis does very well, namely short, memorable melodies in a familiar format. In fact, “Shed” as a whole stands as an interesting sidebar to Mr. Marsalis’s “Soul Gestures in Southern Blue,” which was recorded around the same time with Mr. Roberts in the band.

At the Allen Room, two of the horns in Mr. Roberts’s band were famous Lincoln Center vets, the alto saxophonist Wess Anderson (the lone veteran of the original recording) and the trombonist Ron Westray. The four remaining horns were younger players, some students of Mr. Roberts: The other saxes, Stephen Riley and Derek Douget, were particularly interesting in that both had an introspective sound reminiscent of Lucky Thompson or late-career Joe Henderson; you don’t hear many 20-something saxophonists sound like that. Their two-tenor trade-off on the third movement was one of the highlights of the work, which was otherwise somewhat tentatively played. At no point did any of the soloists, including the composer, stand up, take charge, and knock everybody’s socks off. Nevertheless, “Deep in the Shed” is easily worth the 75 minutes it takes to hear it again after nearly 20 years.

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Wycliffe Gordon also played on the 1989 recording of “Shed,” but rather than join Mr. Roberts’s nonet, he was appearing this weekend with his own group, 60 blocks north of Columbus Circle at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre. At the start of the evening, the trombonist apologized for not having assembled a concept for the concert; rather, it was the kind of familiar combination of originals and standards, blues and ballads, that a jazz group plays in a basic nightclub mode.

But there was nothing basic about Mr. Gordon’s all-star quintet, which features the pianist Cyrus Chestnut and trumpeter Jeremy Pelt (in addition to bassist Dezron Douglas and drummer Rodney Green) and is marked by the high quality of the playing. During the course of the long-ish evening, there was no shortage of outstanding solos to make us whistle and cheer.

I’ve heard Mr. Gordon perform his own words and music to “Shhhh,” a novelty designed to keep club patrons quiet, many times. But hearing it with Mr. Chestnut at the piano made me realize that it’s fundamentally a blues piece. They are an interesting pair even to look at — Mr. Chestnut, with his narrow face and spectacles, looking like an evangelical minister, and Mr. Gordon, with his broad shoulders and features, looking like a cross between a linebacker and a bear.

Like Mr. Roberts, Messrs. Gordon and Chestnut move easily between traditional and modern jazz styles. Mr. Pelt showed off his Clifford Brown-influenced romantic approach on “Violets for Your Furs” on flugelhorn, while Mr. Chestnut nearly set his keyboard on fire with “Yardbird Suite,” one of Charlie Parker’s most original originals. Mr. Gordon’s other vocal feature was “That Old Feeling,” essayed with a swing-era vibrato on his horn and Armstrongian gravel in his chops. As a whole, the quintet played in the hardbop mold of the Jazz Messengers, with Mr. Chestnut recalling Bobby Timmons and Mr. Pelt doing the same for Lee Morgan. It’s almost a cliché for a set to climax with “Caravan” and a big drum solo, but Mr. Gordon (who introduced it on didgeridoo) and co. played the Juan Tizol-Duke Ellington theme with so much energy and freshness that nobody minded.

Mr. Gordon’s trombone solo on “Caravan” consisted mainly of grunts and growls arranged in a coherent musical fashion, the legacy of Joe Oliver and Joe Nanton and what old-timers used to call “freak” playing. That’s the same way he plays another Ellington theme, “The Feeling of Jazz,” at the end of his newest album, “We 2” (WJ3 Records), his second set of duets with the brilliant pianist and fellow former Wyntonian Eric Reed.

Messrs. Gordon and Reed will reunite next week at the Miller Theatre’s “Eric Reed and the Reverend Thomas A. Dorsey,” featuring Mr. Gordon and a six-piece ensemble as well as a gospel chorus. And here’s hoping that the Gordon-Reed series continues, maybe even into some “concept” packages — Mr. Gordon’s apology notwithstanding. The pair could record a set of ballads, a roster of spirituals, or even play an evening of klezmer or a tribute to Lawrence Welk or Snoop Dog and make it sound good.

wfriedwald@nysun.com