Every year in New York, the major jazz festivals arrive in early summer — JVC, Vision, Jazz In July. For much of this decade, however, an equally dependable lineup of annual jazz events has been accumulating in September: the FONT: Festival of New Trumpet Music, the Diet Coke Women in Jazz Festival, the Fred Hersch Piano Duo Series and, lately, what amounts to a mini-series of John Coltrane birthday events (there are at least three in 2007). This year, the seasonal boom has been somewhat marred by the citywide taxi strike — cabs are essential for hopping from club to club on weeknights — but on Wednesday evening I managed to catch the Cindy Blackman Project at Dizzy’s and then scoot down to Jazz Standard for the second night of the Fred Hersch two-piano series.

From the first downbeat, it’s obvious that the quintet led by Cindy Blackman, who has recorded 10 albums as a leader, is a drummer’s band. Over the history of jazz, the drums have come increasingly forward: They were essentially in the background in the premodern era, whereas in the postmodern era there tends to be no separation between the frontline and rhythm section. Ms. Blackman, however, takes her inspiration from the late Tony Williams, in whose music the drums are everywhere at once: They’re in the front as well as the back, in every solo and in every written ensemble part, and they are at once the propeller in the rear of a ship and the one at the nose of an airplane.

The Ohio-born Ms. Blackman, who began her career as Williams did, with saxophonist Jackie McLean’s band, has made her “project” into a tribute to Williams. Apart from his extensive recording on Blue Note (with Mr. McLean and otherleaders),Williamswasbestknown for his crucial tenure with Miles Davis and then for his own underappreciated band Lifetime — a group that led the charge of the jazz-and-electricity movement no less than the Davis disciples Herbie Hancock and the Weather Reporters. In Ms. Blackman’s project, the fine tenor saxophonist J.D. Allen takes the place of the strong tenors whom Williams was always associated with, like Sam Rivers and Wayne Shorter, and to fill the shoes of John McLaughlin, Ms. Blackman has found another British fusion guitarist in Fionn O Lochlainn. Carlton Holmes and George Mitchell round out the group on electric keyboards and fender bass.

In the spirit of Lifetime, thegroup began with two longish jams that posited extended jazz improvisations over what were essentially funk rhythmic patterns, the first piece more free form, the second with more of the peaks and valleys of composition. What’s fascinating is the way the piano and the drums go in for role reversal: When Ms. Williams takes off on an extended flight of fancy, Mr. Holmes accompanies her by playing staccato rhythm patterns withouta sustaining pedal on his electric piano, producing a sound reminiscent of the vibes-drum duo sections on Williams’s tune “Memory.”

For the third piece, Mr. Holmes and Mr. Mitchell switched to acoustic instruments in the spirit of Williams’s first albums as a leader, the original “Life Time” and “Spring.” The acoustic section built to a drum solo, which was followed by a rather sleepy ballad with the electric instruments. The project wound up with Williams’s butt kicker “Vuelta Abajo,” a high-energy piece in which the drums achieve a Zen-like oneness with the universe.

Bolting from Dizzy’s, I haggled withacabbiewhowantedtocharge me double the usual rate to go from Columbus Circle to the Jazz Standard. It turned out to be worth the extra dough: When I arrived, the line stretched all the way down the corridor and up the stairs of that underground club and spilled out into the traffic on East 27th Street; had I gotten there any later I would have had to try to sit in Gramercy Park without a key. This is the fourth of Mr. Hersch’s annual week-long invitationals at Jazz Standard.

Whereas in previous years, Mr. Hersch has played opposite every kind of instrument, from that of Joe Lovano to that of Nancy King (documented in one of the best albums of 2006), this year marks the first time Mr. Hersch is doing a whole week of four-handed twopiano duets.

I would hardly expect Mr. Hersch to do the usual thing in such a situation, which would be a dueling pianos-style competition, as the combatants trade fours, shoot a few bars at their opponent, and then duck. Instead, the Hersch-Mehldau duos were a case of giveand-give, with one participant leading and the other keeping up with him, staying together even whendepartingforpartsunknown. The duo had a different approach for each of the three most familiar melodies. On “Think Of One,” they kept Thelonious Monk’s tune in mind but tinkered continually with the time. On “I Fall In Love Too Easily,” they scattered the melody to the hinterlands but retained the ballad mood. On the official closer, “You and the night and the music,” they threw both the tune and the time to the four winds and headed straight for the twilight zone, yet they never lost each other or the crowd.

In between, they performed a duet on Mr. Mehldau’s pretty “The Secret Beach” and on Jane Ira Bloom’s “Janeology,” which Mr. Hersch aptly described as a contrafact (a new composition based on an existing piece of music) taken from the harmonies to Charlie Parker’s “Confirmation.” This latter piece was the most abstract, with the two pianists skittering about their keyboards like two mice in tennis shoes. They each played a solo, Mr. Hersch’s being a somewhat de-bossa’ed version of Jobim’s “Insensatez,” itself allegedly inspired by Chopin’s Fourth Prelude. The set ended with huggies between the two pianists and, even though it was almost 11 p.m., a spur of the moment encore on “Blue Monk.” Here, they stayed true to the tune, the tempo, and the spirit of the basic blues. The set that began with Monk now, appropriately, ended with him; the evening as a whole had progressed from funk to Monk.

wfriedwald@nysun.com