The Blue Note is New York’s biggest jazz club, and customarily the venue to find big names, big bands, and big concepts (like the tributes to Coleman Hawkins and Dizzy Gillespie planned for the fall). But thanks to thoughtful double booking, two of the finest purveyors of a more intimate style of jazz are currently transforming that often boisterous, tourist-filled club. And both sound better the later it gets.

The Ron Carter Trio and The Freddy Cole Quartet both offer a veritable seminar in the different brands of jazz intimacy: Mr. Cole’s group is swinging, romantic, and light (as opposed to “lite” or “smooth”). Mr. Carter’s threesome displays the sort of virtuoso chamber playing that’s never merely academic.

Mr. Cole’s piano work and singing come from the same stylistic universe as that of his brother Nat King Cole, who would have turned 85 this year. The younger Cole’s group is rooted in harmonic interplay and doubled notes between piano and guitar (Jerry Byrd).The original King Cole Trio’s reliance on block chords anticipated the George Shearing Quintet, but the Freddy Cole Quartet is more mellow and relaxed than either.

This group takes its time, offering big spaces between notes that occasionally remind one of Ahmad Jamal. He rarely sings his older brother’s signature hits, though he does bring back a few of the lesser known tunes that the King recorded: Marvin Fisher’s 1958 “Something Happens to Me” (a great song buried on an obscure single), and “Wild Is Love,” which he makes wilder with a groovy bossa beat.

Even more than his brother, who died at 45, long before he had finished his artistic evolution, everything Freddy Cole sings is a love song. He wraps the tunes in his warm, husky voice – even “Crazy, But I’m In Love,” which is usually rendered as a strictly rhythmic romp. He lunges into “You’re Sensational” like a cat pouncing and croons “On My Way to You.” On “Invitation,” he stands up, sans piano, backed by a mystical tom-tom beat (from drummer Charlie Boyd) that makes it sound more like “Invocation.”

In Mr. Carter’s trio, the instrumentation of Mr. Carter’s bass, pianist Mulgrew Miller, and guitarist Russell Malone would seem, on the surface, to also represent an outgrowth of the King Cole Trio. But Mr. Carter telegraphs his intentions by titling his new album, “The Golden Striker” (Blue Note 90831), and naming this ensemble “The Golden Striker Trio.”

In the manner of John Lewis’s legendary Modern Jazz Quartet, this threesome brings fugal and baroque techniques to jazz improvisation. There’s a delicate balance continually maintained between the formal, highly contrapuntal ensemble music and the ad-libbed solos.

When Mr. Miller played the Vanguard last month, he was in customary Bud Powell mode, playing about a mil lion notes per second. Here he played far fewer notes, but made them mean more. Mr. Carter himself, nearly as tall as his seven-foot-high double bass, is as imposing musically as he is physically, and he treated us to a gorgeous, unaccompanied bass rendition of Ann Ronell’s Gersh winesque “Willow Weep for Me.”

Russell Malone, an irrepressible improviser, filled the role Milt Jackson did in the classic quartet. As the title of Mr. Malone’s latest album, the highly recommended “Playground” (Max Jazz 601), indicates, he constantly pushes for a more freewheeling approach. Mr. Carter and Mr. Miller held up the bastions of ensemble order. As the late set progressed (they went on until about 11:30 on Tuesday night), the music became looser and the solos deeper.

As on the album, the last number was “Autumn Leaves” – a song with Gallic origins but best known as an American standard associated with Nat King Cole. Near the end of his set, Freddy Cole had sung another French tune, Michel Legrand’s “How Do You Keep the Music Playing?” But long before that, he had already answered his own question.