With Iron Man, Speed Racer, and Indiana Jones in town, not to mention the Hulk and Batman due to arrive shortly, I find myself in a summer action-comic book mood. This is a great season for superheroes, and right now the city is appropriately blessed with two saxophonists of superhuman abilities.

James Carter (currently at Birdland) and Scott Robinson (making regular appearances at the Ear Inn) are archetypical postmodern jazzmen who showcase a formidable technique in a range of jazz styles without sacrificing a distinctive voice.

Mr. Robinson is a regularly featured player in the rotating cast that gathers every Sunday at the Lower West Side’s Ear Inn, under the leadership of the trumpeter Jon-Erik Kellso. This week, the EarRegulars comprised Messrs. Kellso and Robinson, as well as Eddy Davis on banjo and vocals, and Kelly Friesen on bass. Mr. Robinson plays virtually every horn known to man, and though he only schlepped a mere two down to the Inn for his most recent Sunday performance, they were two archaic implements not often heard: the baritone horn and the C-melody saxophone.

Mr. Robinson’s use of the C-melody sax, the long-dormant stepchild of the saxophone family, took the instrument far beyond where it’s been before; he soloed brilliantly on the World War II ballad “I Had the Craziest Dream.”

Mr. Robinson’s new album, “Forever Lasting” (arborsrecords.com), is outstanding not only for its variety but its consistency. Even though he plays more horns than you can shake a mouthpiece at, the tunes are all by the late and sublimely gifted Thad Jones. It’s part of Mr. Robinson’s antic wit to render the music of an iconic modern composer with a battery of instruments rarely heard since the 1920s.

On “Yours and Mine,” he gets such an amazing sound out of his saxophone that, upon first listen, I assumed he was playing some unique horn I had never heard before; it turned out he was playing the plain old tenor sax, but with such a distinctive, personal timbre that it might as well be renamed a “Scottophone.”

Apart from Mr. Robinson, James Carter is virtually the only musician to play the C-melody in the postmodern jazz era: In 1996, he and pianist D.D. Jackson featured it on an exuberant, hair-raising variation of “I Got Rhythm.” More than a decade later, Mr. Jackson is part of Mr. Carter’s septet, both at Birdland and on the new “Present Tense” (Emarcy Records). At Birdland this week, Mr. Carter didn’t bring his C-melody or his low-A alto sax, but he did have four horns on the bandstand.

Mr. Carter’s favorite composer these days seems to be Victor Young: He opened the late show on Wednesday with a reading of “Street of Dreams” that seemed inspired by the song’s hallucinogenic lyric. He started with an introduction so rubato it was almost classical, then played the melody chorus all lovely and lyrical before switching into a funk mode, with a heavy backbeat and free-jazz distortions. On the album, he delivers a similarly exotic treatment of Young’s “Song of Delilah.”

Both at Birdland and on the album, Mr. Carter is making eclecticism seem like a worthy goal in and of itself: “Dodo’s Bounce” is a swing-to-bop rewrite of “Ain’t Misbehavin'” that pianist Dodo Marmarosa recorded with the no-less-legendary tenor saxophonist Lucky Thompson in 1946. Here, it’s played by Messrs. Carter and Adams with a flute-and-mute combination, à la 1950s-era Count Basie.

“Bossa JC” is a gently undulating Brazilian-style original, which, at Birdland especially, becomes dark and sinister at the climax. Exotic in a different way, “Pour Que Ma Vie Demeure” had Mr. Carter combining two leading icons of French jazz, Django Reinhardt (who wrote it but never recorded it) and Sidney Bechet, whom Mr. Carter evoked on soprano. He stayed on soprano for a tune not on the album, Basie’s “One O’Clock Jump,” switching to baritone sax after the head (a rare B-flat to E-flat transition). Mr. Carter can get freaky and dissonant, but here the septet, with Mr. Adams’s trumpet, sounded like a small group date for Keynote; Mr. Carter often blends the far-out and the far-in within the same solo, and lately he seems to be doing it at the same time, to have a traditional rhythm section playing against a screaming free jazz solo. He uses honks and screams not just the way the free jazzers do, but the way R&B-styled tenorists do, and thus somehow reconciles what is generally considered the least commercial variety of the music with the most accessible.

At some point, I would love to see Messrs. Carter and Robinson share a stage, although there probably isn’t a bandstand big enough to hold their joint arsenal of horns. If they keep going and growing at their present rates, it’s easy to imagine that they’ll both be named NEA Jazz Masters at some point. Long before that, however, I’m sure they’ll be asked to join the Legion of Super Heroes or the Justice League of America.

wfriedwald@nysun.com