The pianist Fred Hersch, who is appearing this week with his trio at the Village Vanguard, has a way of playing introductions like ships on the horizon. You can see them way off in the distance, at the very edge of the water, and as they sail closer and closer, their outlines gradually become clearer and more familiar. By the time the first ship reached port at the Vanguard on Tuesday night, it was at last recognizable as “So in Love.” Mr. Hersch knows how to make a song’s melody announce itself with a mere two notes, only an ascending half-step apart, and though he went on to play the rest of the tune, those two notes were all that was needed to identify Cole Porter’s classic.

Mr. Hersch can play these two notes in almost any sort of context fast, slow, high, or low, but his grasp of the melody is so firm that no matter how or where he puts the notes, we hear the opening words of the melody, “Strange, dear….” in our heads. He makes these notes sound anything but strange.

“So in Love” launched Mr. Her sch’s opening set and does the same for his new album, “Night and the Music” (Palmetto) — his first studio-recorded trio set since 1994. This particular lineup of the trio, with bassist Drew Gress and drummer Nasheet Waits, has been playing together at least since 2002, when they recorded a live al bum at the Vanguard. Of course Mr. Hersch is more than capable of doing it on his own: Last year he became the first pianist to play a completely solo engagement at the Vanguard, jazz’s longest-running venue.

Mr. Hersch gives listeners a lot of bang for their buck, not simply be cause he plays a full 80-minute set but because every piece is crammed with a lot of ideas in a very small space. For other artists, bass and drum solos can seem like filler, but Mr. Hersch deploys these only when they help the music; many of his best pieces are just him all the way through, with nary a peep from the rhythm section.

This method became clear on Irving Berlin’s “Change Partners,” which opened with a bass intro and relied heavily on Mr. Gress’s sup port. Still, no partners were actual ly changed. “So In Love” followed the same formula: Without making a point of it or grandstanding, Mr Hersch proceeded, after the intro and the opening melody, to play the tune every which way: hard driv ing, like a boppish blues; Latinate and danceable; abstract and almost free-form; and highly melodic, using what is sometimes called the “locked hands” technique but sounding nothing like George Shearing.

Ten years ago, Mr. Hersch recorded “Thelonious,” a collection of 12 interpretations of Monk songs. He continues to find new approaches to Monk’s compositions, two of which (“Boo Boo’s Birthday” and “Misterioso”) appear on “Night and the Music,” while another was heard on Tuesday. “San Francisco Holiday” (aka “Worry Later”) hails from a period in Monk’s career when he was working regularly and recording several albums in that city. One of those albums, 1959’s “Thelonious Alone in San Francisco,” sported a cover depicting the longtime New Yorker clinging uneasily to a Bay City cable car. The tune “San Francisco Holiday” is one of Monk’s most memorable locomotives, choo-chooing along with a trainlike beat. Mr. Hersch, after announcing Tuesday night that the trio was playing “San Francisco Holiday” for the first time, kept the number steadily on track, at times slowing down like a steam engine trying to make it over the hill, at other times derailing the melody to deconstruct it in a postmodern fashion. This is a percussive tune that lends itself naturally to a drum solo, and Mr. Waits obliged as Mr. Hersch sprinkled notes around him.

The trio also played several originals in the first set, including the new “A Lark” and “Gravity’s Pull,” a gentle piece without unnecessary heaviness (also heard on the album). There was also a collage of two Wayne Shorter tunes from the composer’s classic Blue Note period, both of which evoked exotic, far-flung lands. It started with the introspective “Miyako,” in which Mr. Hersch made time elastic, stretching it out and elongating the tune. Then he used a bass solo as a transition into the more boppish “Black Nile,” where the pianist revealed more of a Bud Powell influence, playing outrageously fast with Latin accents á la “Un Poco Loco.”

There was one other standout standard, “How Deep Is the Ocean.” Another Berlin ballad, this 1932 song is one of the most profound tunes in his canon, and Mr. Hersch’s treatment was suitably deep. Despite the interaction of two other musicians, and in spite of Mr. Hersch’s incredible keyboard chops, both the pianist and the piano seemed to be made of glass here — not in the sense of being delicate or breakable (though he is an extraordinarily sensitive player) but in terms of being completely transparent. You don’t see the instrument, you don’t see the player, but you can see the music clear as day in front of you, even in a dimly lit cellar like the Vanguard.

By the time this ship pulls into port, there’s no mistaking that the ocean is very deep indeed. Strange, dear, but true.

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If you’re wondering how I know that Frederick S. Hersch was born in Cincinnati in 1955, studied at that city’s conservatory, played for Woody Herman in 1977, and gained his early experience and exposure with such veteran boppers as Art Farmer, Joe Henderson, Stan Getz, and James Moody, it’s because I read it in “The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz,” by Ira Gitler and the late Leonard Feather. One of the two or three most essential reference books on jazz, the latest edition of the “Biographical Encyclopedia” has just been published in paperback by Oxford University Press. I confess to owning every edition of this work and its predecessor, the original “Encyclopedia of Jazz,” first published in 1955. It is still the first place I turn for information on any jazz musician, and is on the whole much more reliable than what you’ll find on the Internet.

wfriedwald@nysun.com