If the great songwriters of the golden age of cinema scores are less celebrated than their Broadway counterparts, they have only themselves to blame. If their goal was to create audio imagery that would be an inseparable counterpart to on-screen visuals and narrative action, they succeeded so well that it’s traditionally been difficult to appreciate — and reinterpret — their work.

To paraphrase André Previn, composers who worked in the movie business, even tremendous talents such as Henry Mancini and Harry Warren (known as “Hollywood’s musical genius”), were typically treated by the serious music academy as if they had cooties. Now, two mainstays of the New York jazz scene, the saxophonist Ted Nash and the arranger-conductor David Berger, have released new albums reinterpreting the music of Warren and Mancini. Mr. Nash and his “Mancini Project” quartet are also doing three nights this week at Jazz Standard, while Mr. Berger and his Orchestra continue to play Tuesdays at Birdland (where he introduced this music last month).

Several worthy instrumental collections of Mancini’s music have surfaced since the composer’s death in 1994, including those by saxophone legends James Moody and Phil Woods, and vibraphonist Joe Locke. Still, Mr. Nash’s new project is by far the most dutiful and personal tribute that one could imagine. Mr. Nash, who is best known to New Yorkers as the longtime alto saxophone soloist with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, is, in some sense, born to play Mancini. His father, the trombonist Dick Nash, and his uncle and namesake, the saxophonist Ted Nash, were among the busiest studio musicians in Los Angeles during Mancini’s reign, and are prominently featured on nearly every Mancini commercial recording or movie soundtrack.

“The Mancini Project,” as Mr. Nash calls both his album and his band, could be viewed as an attempt to reconcile his childhood as a scion of Hollywood musical royalty with his adult life as a contemporary New York jazz musician. He is interested in Mancini the “pure” composer, not Mancini the Oscar-decorated celebrity. He doesn’t address any of the Academy Award-winning blockbuster hits, apart from the comparatively lesser known “Two for the Road,” and imbues everything with an edge and an attitude that’s more Birdland than Rodeo Drive. The Quartet makes “The Night Visitor” sound as if it were written and played by Wayne Shorter, like a second cousin of “Night Dreamer” and “Children of the Night.”

Instead of “Moon River,” probably Mancini’s single most famous work, Mr. Nash gives us two relatively obscure pieces from the score of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” It may seem perverse for Mr. Nash to revive “Mr. Yunioshi,” thus reminding us of the only element of that classic movie that we’d like to forget (Mickey Rooney doing a bucktooth, slant-eyed routine), but the quartet retools it along the lines of Horace Silver’s “The Tokyo Blues.” The title song itself is so obscure that even the people who have seen the movie multiple times may not know there even is a title song; he plays it as a medium-bouncing bopper, accompanied only by bassist Ben Allison and drummer Matt Wilson. If there was anyone at the opening show on Tuesday who didn’t immediately get the reference to Sonny Rollins’s classic tenor trios, Mr. Nash quickly settled their hash by quoting “Oleo” early on.

The “Mancini Project” album is as much about Mr. Nash’s father and his uncle as it is about Mancini himself. The leader revisits two pieces composed expressly for the Nash Brothers. The first is “A Quiet Happening” (from the 1967 album “Peter Gunn, Number One”), for his uncle, which he leaves essentially untouched (the original sounds remarkably contemporary 40 years later). The second, “Something for Nash,” was a cue, from the long-forgotten “Blind Date,” for Dick Nash’s trombone that Ted the younger and his pianist, Frank Kimbrough, transform into a bossa nova for flute, exposing a lovely melody that cries out for a Leslie Bricusse lyric.

On Tuesday, Mr. Nash closed his set with “Dreamsville,” which he played like a two-sided 45-inch single — first as a romantic ballad with only Mr. Kimbrough, in a beautiful first half that’s more than an intro, and then as a full rhythm-romper in which the voyagers to dreamsville seem wide awake.

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Joe Temperley, who sits two chairs down from Mr. Nash in the Lincoln Center reed section, is one of the featured stars on David Berger’s “I Had the Craziest Dream — The Music of Harry Warren.” The other is Harry Allen, who ought to be in that band, since there isn’t a tenor player swinging harder anywhere. Both take charge right off the bat on the album’s opener, “Jeepers Creepers,” a song originally written for Louis Armstrong to sing to a racehorse, and one generally taken at a horse-race tempo. For the second song, Mr. Allen is off to the races again with “You’ll Never Know,” an Oscar-winner inspired by the opening bell at Santa Anita. Also featured are two seasonally appropriate up-tempo numbers, both of which are done by modern jazzmen and practically no one else: “Summer Night,” a dynamic feature for Marshall Gilkes, and “September in the Rain.”

The pairings continue, including “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” with “I Had the Craziest Dream,” and “Million Dollar Baby” with “The Gold Digger’s Song.” Mr. Berger is an expert at approximating a diverse range of musical styles. For example, Warren’s Hollywood tango, “The Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” can now be a street song in Buenos Aires, with the main dancer being Mr. Temperley; “Million Dollar Baby” becomes considerably more modern, using a flute lead inspired by the Quincy Jones-Dizzy Gillespie ditty “Jessica’s Day.”

But when he’s not referencing a specific style, Mr. Berger’s own writing is a copacetic hybrid of swing and bop. “Serenade in Blue,” which spotlights the trumpeter Brian Pareschi, could be a modernist update of either Harry James or Glenn Miller, with all the drama and romance that their era evokes. Like everyone else in the last 50 years, Mr. Berger can’t hear “I’m an Old Cowhand” (credited entirely to Johnny Mercer, but partially written by Warren) without incorporating echoes of Sonny Rollins, who did for that Warren song what Miles Davis did for “Summer Night.”

It’s hard to think of either Warren or Mancini as being undervalued when each had multiple Oscars on his mantle. Still, their contributions to two of America’s greatest additions to world culture — the cinema and jazz — are immeasurable, just as the scenes they depicted sonically are indelible in our collective memory. “Moon River” itself is never actually shown in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” It merely exists as a metaphor, mentioned only in the song. But somehow all of us would swear that we’ve seen it.

wfriedwald@nysun.com