It had to be indicative of something when Kurt Rosenwinkel titled the first track on his new album “Chords,” and I realized what it was the instant his quintet started to play on Tuesday night at the Village Vanguard. There it was, right onstage: a piano.

Lately, I’ve grown so accustomed to jazz groups featuring front lines of guitar and tenor saxophone that when I know a band has a guitarist, I automatically assume that it won’t also have a pianist. I won’t say it’s grown tiresome or predictable, but I hope that jazz never reaches the point where guitar-driven, no-piano groups become the norm. At times, I think the idea works best, in fact, in swing-style combos, such as Lester Young’s classic Kansas City Six sessions of 1938, and the contemporary quartet led by Harry Allen (sax) and Joe Cohn (guitar).

Many of the current groups that espouse guitar and eschew piano seem to be suggesting that harmony (and, by extension, melody) in jazz is like water in a desert — it’s a good thing, but we have to ration it very carefully. By contrast, the guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel’s music literally drips with harmony and melody. It is saturated with the stuff, almost lousy with it; melody here is more like water in a swamp — it’s everywhere you turn. The use of a piano in his quintet is a tip-off that Mr. Rosenwinkel is going to be very generous indeed with harmony and melody: He keeps dishing it out as if he’s got an endless supply of the stuff. Take all you want, mister; there’s plenty more where that came from.

Mr. Rosenwinkel’s quintet at the Vanguard, which will play there through Sunday, is essentially the same one that appears on Mr. Rosenwinkel’s most recent record, “The Remedy” (Artists Choice), which was also recorded live at the Vanguard — Mark Turner (tenor saxophone), Aaron Goldberg (piano), Ben Street (bass), and Obed Calvaire (drums). The tunes, however, are entirely different: On Tuesday, the leader began with “Our Secret World,” followed it with “Vibrations,” and moved on to a bolero-like ballad called “Another Time.” I generally regard Mr. Turner, who wrote one of the tunes on the album, “Myron’s World” (the other seven are the leader’s originals), as one of our most distinctly introspective young musicians; his playing with Mr. Rosenwinkel, however, is much more outgoing, even brash, than with his own groups. Mr. Rosenwinkel’s own timbre on his instrument, no less than Mr. Turner’s, is highly unique. At his feet is an enormous pedal board, but unlike a lot of contemporary guitarists I hear at the Vanguard, he doesn’t have a synthesized, soundscape approach. Rather, he employs a 50-plus-year-old Fender Twin amplifier to create what sounds like an organic approach to electronics. Having Mr. Goldberg on piano allows Mr. Rosenwinkel’s playing to be bi-functional in more than one sense: When the full ensemble is playing, the guitar is part of the front line “horn” section, playing in tight harmony with the tenor sax. However, when Mr. Turner is soloing, the piano often drops out, and Mr. Rosenwinkel assumes the role of the rhythm section. Mr. Goldberg soloed especially well on “Safe Corners,” as well as on his own “Nemesis,” the closing piece on Tuesday, which evoked a Motown-like groove with old-school pop triplets.

Mr. Rosenwinkel is also extremely inventive with his unaccompanied solo passages. Using a combination of carefully controlled reverb and the occasional hum-along, he makes individual notes sound like chords. What’s especially satisfying about his music is that even though he sometimes seems to be playing everything at once, unlike a lot of younger players he never drowns the listener in a deluge of notes. He knows well the difference between enough and too much.

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When we talk about old school, you can’t get much more so than singer Catherine Russell. It’s standard practice among contemporary musicians to make an old song sound new by modernizing its harmonies and substituting newer chord changes for the original. Ms. Russell, by contrast, freshens a song by what could be called the process of “antiquing” it: She takes the 1953 Dinah Washington song “My Man’s an Undertaker,” for example, and moves it backward stylistically from the R&B era to the mid-1920s and the vaudeville blues of Bessie Smith. In fact, on Wednesday at Joe’s Pub, Ms. Russell opened with “My Old Daddy’s Got a Brand New Way To Love,” which pretty much tells you all you need to know.

That song is at the center of her new album, “Sentimental Streak” (World Village), which surely is ironically titled: Since nearly every song is a variation on the blues, and since there’s nothing that could be considered glossily sentimental on it, Ms. Russell could have easily titled the record “Blue Streak.”

“Sentimental Streak” is at once more keenly focused and no less diverse than her first album, 2005’s “Cat.” The first two tracks, “So Little Time, So Much To Do” and “I’m Lazy, That’s All,” convincingly argue two different sides of the same debate. With the assistance of trumpeter Steven Bernstein and members of his regular cast of downtowners, who specialize in finding ways to make the 1930s and ’40s sound contemporary, Ms. Russell continues to find the common ground between past and present.

On “Sentimental Streak,” the blues of Willie Dixon and Nellie Lutcher slide in seamlessly with the show tunes of E. Y. Harburg and Jimmy Van Heusen. When she sings “I’ve Got That Thing,” by her father, Panama-cum-New Orleans pianist Luis Russell, she leaves no doubt that it’s the same “thing” described by bluesman Papa Charlie Jackson in “Shake That Thing” and even by Cole Porter in “You’ve Got That Thing,” to name just two songs. In Ms. Russell’s music, the banjo and the tuba (not least because they’re played by Matt Munisteri and Howard Johnson) are just as hip and modern as Mr. Rosenwinkel’s electronics kit.

wfriedwald@nysun.com