Ira Sullivan, who is co-starring this week with the Eric Alexander Quartet at Dizzy’s at Jazz at Lincoln Center, is an amazing musician whose career has been defined largely by geography — of both the instrumental and physical sort. He is a rare multi-instrumentalist who is equally adept on both saxophone and trumpet — so much so that it is impossible to say which is his primary horn — and he is fluent on all manner of percussion and wind instruments as well.

Geographically, Mr. Sullivan was born in Washington, D.C., 75 years ago, became a key player in the Chicago jazz scene of the 1950s, and spent most of the intervening years as a jazz sage in South Florida, mentoring many musicians from that area. If he has found less renown than his ability might suggest, it’s because he has never spent enough time in New York or on the national stage. But it’s not as if he hasn’t had the opportunity: In 1956 he toured with Art Blakey as the first white Jazz Messenger, and he recorded consistently throughout the 1950s.

Mr. Sullivan’s role as special guest with Mr. Alexander is characteristic in that he is something of the jazzman who came to dinner: the sideman who steals the show and becomes a veritable coleader. That was the case in his longstanding collaboration with the pioneering bebop trumpeter Red Rodney; the two began working together off and on in the 1950s, but when they joined forces on a more permanent basis 25 years later, the result was one of the great bop revival bands.

Not that stealing the show from Mr. Alexander is any easier than it was with Rodney. In the 15 years since the tenor saxist placed second to Joshua Redman in the 1991 Thelonious Monk Competition, Mr. Alexander has made the transition from a young lion, with the formidable athletic technique of a college football player on steroids, to a dependably exciting professional. He has taken full advantage of the opportunity to work steadily with one of the great rhythm sections of the current day, featuring the veteran pianist Harold Mabern along with John Webber on bass and Joe Farnsworth on drums; the threesome is generally found on the road with George Coleman, Mr. Alexander, or serving as the house band at Smoke.

On Wednesday night, Mr. Alexander began with a difficult act to follow: “Night Song” from the Sammy Davis Jr. musical “Golden Boy” — an appropriate opener for this golden boy of the tenor; he revved up this pensive Broadway ballad into a quasi-modal barn burner. This was the late show of the second night of the gig, and one had the feeling that both Messrs. Alexander and Mabern were trying to top Mr. Sullivan before he made his entrance as a kind of pre-emptive strike. Mr. Mabern, in particular, played like he wanted to show off in front of an old friend, displaying even more piano pyrotechnics than usual — not to mention goofy, left-field quotes, like the “Turkey in the Straw” (which Mr. Sullivan and Rodney referenced in their 1957 “Red Arrow) and “Yakkety Sax” (I didn’t see that one coming).

Playing soprano, Mr. Sullivan entered with a Coltrane-y treatment of “Speak Low,” which both he and Mr. Alexander rendered with a more vertical, densely harmonic style, taking the first chorus in rubato to make it serve as an extended introduction. Mr. Sullivan grew even more aggressive on the classic bebop blues “Wee Dot”(which he attributed to Fats Navarro, though it’s normally credited to J.J. Johnson); he played it on trumpet, with a cleanly crackling style reminiscent of Dizzy Gillespie. Mr. Sullivan then switched to flute for the Brazilian “Manha de Carnivale,” playing his second solo on this samba on muted trumpet, switching back to flute for the last chorus to harmonize with Mr. Alexander’s tenor.

After two show tunes, a bossa and a blues, it was time to go to church, and Mr. Mabern obliged with a down-home, soulgospel-boogaloo he called “Rakin’ and Scrapin.” Still competitive even in the house of the Lord, Mr. Sullivan responded with a moving treatment of “Amazing Grace,” done relatively straight as a flute-piano duet. The climax, however, had already occurred two tunes earlier in the blues, which built up to a brutal battle of b-flat horns (trumpet and tenor) by a young lion and an old one. I wouldn’t want to say who won, I’m just glad I wasn’t caught in the middle of it.

***

It’s always rewarding when a program of familiar songs turns out to be an evening of surprises. On Wednesday at Zankel Hall, “Standard Time,” Michael Feinstein’s long-running series of songbook concerts, launched its new season with “The Way They Are: Celebrating the Lyrics of Alan and Marilyn Bergman.” What was surprising was that Mr. Feinstein’s own standout number was not one of the lyric-writing team’s well-known hits or standards, but a new tune, “Another Night,” from a forthcoming show (“Up Close and Musical”), with music by the late Cy Coleman, which he imbued with autobiographical resonance.

As is customary, the intimate revuestyle presentation at Zankel included several guest stars, among them Carolee Carmello, who did a touching “Fifty Per Cent” and singer-songwriter Rupert Holmes, with a sentimental “That Face.” But the surprise show-stealer was the Nashville-based Lari White (who was wonderful in Broadway’s “Ring of Fire” and Town Hall’s Jerome Kern concert two weeks ago), singing what she described as a “country shicksa” medley of songs from “Yentl” — for me, it was considerably more appealing than the original film itself.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, the lyricist himself, Alan Bergman, gave a reading of “The Windmills of Your Mind” that was a textbook example of how a song can be convincingly performed and a story told by a performer without any trace of a singing voice or ability to carry a tune. A further surprise was in store: for “The Way We Were,” composer Marvin Hamlisch spontaneously ascended from the audience to accompany Mr. Feinstein and caught him off balance by throwing in a few bars of “One,” as a plug for his recentlyrevived “A Chorus Line.”

It was no surprise that Mr. Feinstein was sublimely moving on “How Do You Keep the Music Playing?” and “Where Do You Start?” two classic Bergman songs in the form of a question about sustaining and concluding a long-running relationship. Indeed, it would have been a major surprise if he wasn’t.

wfriedwald@nysun.com