A lot of classic albums were released in 1967 — from Miles Davis’s “Sorcerer” to Bob Dylan’s ” Wesley Harding” to Cap tain Beefheart’s “Safe as Milk” to John Coltrane’s “Interstellar Space” to Jimi Hendrix’s “Axis: Bold As Love” to Frank Sinatra’s remarkable meeting with Antonio Carlos Jobim and the “Cote D’Azur” Concerts of Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington. But it’s a cinch that none of these has been as widely celebrated as the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band,” which will be performed in its entirety by the Fab Faux Saturday night at the Beacon Theater to mark its 40th anniversary.

“It’s my favorite album from start to finish,” said Richard Pagano, drummer and cofounder of the Fab Faux, “because as a body of work it’s untouchable, it flows so well from beginning to end. It was the first album to ever do that, where you can sit down and it suddenly became this cinematic piece, more than just a musical piece, it just sort of builds and builds.”

According to legend, Paul McCartney came up with the idea for “Sgt. Pepper” on an airplane flight. He was driven by the concept that the Beatles, who had barely survived the hysteria of Beatlemania and had quit touring in 1966, would re-create themselves as another band, or a band-within-a-band (which is sort of the way a lot of contemporary jazzmen work, forming a new band for every project). He began by writing songs in the “character” of this new subgroup, and, in the manner of a musical theater piece, decided to bookend the album with an opening song that would be reprised as a closer (much like “Mack the Knife” in “Threepenny Opera”). The “Lonely Hearts Club Band” was at once more modern and more nostalgic than the Beatles, combining modish psychedelic overtones with overt references to earlier musical culture, especially local brass bands with martial overtones (such as John Philip Sousa conducting while looking “a little like a military man”) and lonely hearts clubs, which were anachronistic even during the Beatles’ younger years in the ’40s.

The long-playing record was primarily invented as a medium for full-length classical music works; the idea of a pop or jazz album was initially an afterthought. Yet there were visionaries who saw the possibility of long forms in pop and jazz well before the invention of the long-playing record, most notably Ellington and Sinatra. Between “Ellington Uptown” and Sinatra’s “In the Wee Small Hours,” the “concept” album was well known even by the time the 12-inch LP became a reality in 1955. Within two years, Miles Davis and Gil Evans took the concept of the concept a step further with “Miles Ahead,” which combined original with pre-existing material; all of these efforts flowed seamlessly from track to track, and individual songs added up to a total listening experience that conveyed an implicit narrative. In the case of “Miles Ahead,” much like “Sgt. Pepper,” there was no audible break between tracks — no more than there is between scenes in a movie.

It remained for rock ‘n’ roll, essentially, to re-create what Sinatra, Ellington, and Davis had done with jazz. In the late ’50s, it was assumed that long-playing records were for grown-ups with mature attention spans, whereas singles were the medium for youth-oriented pop. The earliest 12-inchers by Elvis Presley and Ray Charles, for instance, were essentially collections of 12 previously released songs that had already been hits; Charles’s first “concept” albums, importantly, were his forays into the Great American Songbook and jazz rather than his R&B material. The Beatles were among the first groups to help pop catch up to its older brethren, particularly with 1965’s “Rubber Soul” and 1966’s “Revolver.”

This week, “Sgt. Pepper” will bring pop music another step forward: If Wynton Marsalis can recreate Ellington’s music the

way Ellington played it, it stands to reason that classics of other genres also deserve to be performed and heard live. The Fab Faux is as different from a bar (or bar mitzvah) band reprising Beatle hits as the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra is from an ordinary trio jamming on “Take the A Train.”

“We take the original tracks and pull them apart, trying to figure out exactly what’s in there, to get all the chords and nuances exactly right,” Mr. Pagano said. It’s especially notable that the Fab Faux (which includes five regular members) includes all the extra-musical studio effects that were difficult enough to create when the Beatles recorded the album and impossible to play live in 1967, which makes it especially worthwhile since the Beatles themselves never attempted to play “Sgt. Pepper’s” in concert.

wfriedwald@nysun.com