He is far from a predictable man, that Sonny Rollins. Those familiar with his legacy and work would never expect him to recreate one of his own milestones — to do a new concert, for instance, in which he played the music of such classic recordings as “Saxophone Colossus” or “Freedom Suite.” But on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of his first appearance at Carnegie Hall on Tuesday, he was moved to do something special, combining an incredibly valuable, previously undocumented recording with an equally special new performance — either one of which would have been a rafter-rattling event in its own right.

On November 29, 1957, Mr. Rollins and his trio appeared in an all-star jazz line up at Carnegie. Two years ago, the set recorded that evening by the Thelonious Monk Quartet featuring John Coltrane, was released to great acclaim. Now Mr. Rollins has finalized plans to release his 20-minute segment from that amazing night (snippets from which are now being streamed at sonnyrollins.com), as his second release on his own Doxy Music label. To mark the occasion, Mr. Rollins’s Carnegie performance on Tuesday was his first indoor New York concert in some years (for the last two decades, he has appeared almost annually at the Damrosch Park bandshell in Lincoln Center Plaza). A business-as-usual performance by his regular working band would have been a big deal in itself, but Mr. Rollins elected to begin the Carnegie show by convening a new edition of the trio format he used in his early days as a bandleader.

It’s hard enough for any jazzman, even a superstar like Mr. Rollins, to keep a regular band working. Fortunately for Mr. Rollins, fans have long clamored to hear him work outside of that particular box — to perform both with his generational peers and with leading younger players. On Tuesday, his trio included both the veteran bop drummer Roy Haynes, who, at 82, is five years older than the leader, and the dynamic 35-year-old bass star Christian McBride. I don’t know if it was a coincidence that all three were wearing bright white shirts (and this was after Labor Day) and dark trousers, but whatever the case, it made them seem even more like a real band.

Mr. Rollins’s idea was to redo the three songs that he performed in 1957: his original “Sonnymoon for Two,” and two standard show tunes, “Some Enchanted Evening” and “Moritat (Mack the Knife).” He began with a blistering reading of “Sonnymoon,” which he first introduced at the Village Vanguard within weeks of his 1957 Carnegie performance. For 20 minutes — the length of the entire 1957 set — he ransacked the changes, frantically waving his right hand over the lower pads of his tenor as if playing a theremin, blowing what seemed like one continuous line without a breath or a pause.

When he plays with his regular band, Mr. Rollins normally faces outward toward the crowd; with the McBride-Haynes trio, he faced inward, toward the bass and drums, and spent the whole set crouching, as if in battle stance. A good portion of each tune featured an exchange with Messrs. Haynes and McBride, although when Mr. Rollins tried to relegate himself to the background and focus attention on his co-stars, he continued playing behind their solos with melodic background figures that couldn’t help but command our attention.

The shortest track was the middle ballad, which the leader introduced (in a speaking voice that continues to resemble Bugs Bunny’s Martian adversary) as a song from “South Pacific.” Elongating the melody, Mr. Rollins essentially played four slow choruses, including features for Messrs. McBride and Haynes, weaving Richard Rodgers’s core melody in and out of what the bass and drums were doing and never leaving it unheard for very long. Even after 50 years, Mr. Rollins’s ballads are never the least bit sentimental or even remotely romantic — you wouldn’t want to hear him playing love songs with strings — but they’re incredibly emotional and moving just the same.

Mr. Rollins was more referential than usual in the latter two tunes, apparently figuring snatches from famous songs are best heard within the context of other famous songs: I won’t list them all, but the most irreverent one I caught was Pérez Prado’s mambo “Patricia.” Otherwise, Mr. Rollins and the trio continued to fragment old Mack six ways till Sunday, like a magic trick where a hankerchief is continually folded and re-folded into itself.

No one expected the set with his working band — Clifton Anderson on trombone, Bobby Broom on electric guitar, Steve Jordan on drums, Kimati Dinizulu on percussion, plus the stalwart Bob Cranshaw on electric bass — to match the heights of the McBride-Haynes trio, and, in that context, the second set was neither a disappointment nor an anti-climax. The leader played two fast, boppish numbers, “Sonny, Please” (the title of his most recent album) and “Biji,” interspersed with two calypsos, the new “Nu-Nile” and the venerable “Don’t Stop the Carnival.”

In the first half, the sound was perfect where I was sitting (the absence of a piano onstage helped immensely); in the second, the electric instruments and percussion seemed to be absorbed into the abyss, and Mr. Anderson seemed less like a front-liner than a supplement to Mr. Cranshaw’s bass lines. Understandably, the 77-year-old Mr. Rollins had less energy after the intermission, and while it would have made for better showmanship to build to the trio rather than starting with it, it made better musical sense for him to confront the challenge of playing with that group when he was fully charged. As for the second half, Mr. Rollins showed that even when it’s business as usual, business is still booming.

wfriedwald@nysun.com