Jazz presenters are invariably infatuated with birthdays that end in nice round numbers, and 1937 was apparently a bumper crop year. This June, the JVC Jazz Festival honored the 70th birthdays of both Nancy Wilson and Ron Carter. This week, two additional players are celebrating their 70ths with live performances as well: the drummer Louis Hayes at Jazz Standard and the bassist Charlie Haden at the Blue Note.

What makes these celebrations especially interesting is that drummers and bassists are rarely allowed to shine as leaders or stars, and Messrs. Hayes and Haden are using their round-number birthdays as a means of doing something they rarely get to do in a New York club.

Mr. Hayes is best known to jazz aficionados as the drummer with Cannonball and Nat Adderley’s legendary sextet of 1959–65, but he also famously graced the bandstands of pianists Horace Silver, Oscar Peterson, and hundreds of others. Mr. Hayes recorded more than a dozen albums of his own, but is still more widely regarded as a sideman than a leader. That’s why his stint at Jazz Standard marks his most ambitious appearance in New York: He’s actually leading three different groups over a weeklong stand: Tuesday and Wednesday, it was the Cannonball Legacy Band; last night and tonight, it’s the Rising Stars, a group of younger players that Mr. Hayes co-leads with the trombonist Curtis Fuller (whose association with the drummer goes back almost 50 years), and Saturday and Sunday, the group is billed as Louis Hayes and Friends, featuring the outstanding vibraphonist Steve Nelson.

Mr. Haden, by contrast, established himself as a bandleader early in his career, and today he works regularly in front of two of the most consistently rewarding ensembles on the contemporary scene — the Liberation Music Orchestra and Quartet West. He is also one of the inventors of the “Jazz Invitational,” in which a single featured player teams up with a series of guests over a weeklong stint, a programming strategy that is still much more common in foreign festivals than in American clubs. This week, the bassist is joining forces with four expert pianists, beginning with Kenny Barron, Ethan Iverson (of the Bad Plus), and Paul Bley (Tuesday through Thursday), and continuing tonight through Sunday with Brad Mehldau.

At the early set on Tuesday, Mr. Haden announced that he had just returned from a European tour, during which, unfortunately, he suffered a hernia in Belgium. Resultantly, he canceled plans to record this week’s shows at the Blue Note, but said he felt strong enough to play just the same — although a sound technician had to carry his bass on stage for him. Fortunately, Mr. Haden has never depended on an aggressive, inyour-face brand of playing. His five duets with Kenny Barron were more thoughtful and contemplative than exhibitionist.

The duo began with a blues so basic that it didn’t require a title, and continued with one of Mr. Haden’s quintessential originals, “Waltz for Ruth,” the only tune of the show that Mr. Barron had to read from a lead sheet. For the first two pieces, the pianist and bassist kept a somewhat formal distance from each other; Mr. Haden fed Mr. Barron the appropriate chords, but essentially they both soloed with little interaction. This began to break down as they proceeded into two standard ballads, “Body and Soul” and “You Don’t Know What Love Is.” Both songs spotlighted the unusual ability of both pianist and bassist to play out of tempo, but somehow fast. Usually playing rubato is synonymous for playing slowly, which made it all the more compelling when the two at last locked into a groove together.

Interestingly, on the opening blues, Mr. Haden played a solo that used the correct changes, but wasn’tovertlyblues-ishotherwise. As the five tunes wore on, he got progressively bluesier, even on the two ballads. Then on the final piece, Mr. Barron launched into “Blue Monk,” which he and Mr. Haden viewed as a kind of challenge, turning their accompaniment for each other into a vigorous back-and-forth exchange. Both of their solos here were very deep in the blues.

For Tuesday’s late show, Mr. Hayes’s Cannonball Legacy Band played only one tune that could be considered one of Adderley’s greatest hits, the famous “Jive Samba.” Also, the group included only one tune from its new CD, “Maximum Firepower” (High Note), and that was Quincy Jones’s bouncer “Jessica’s Birthday.” The band on the album is essentially the same as the one at Jazz Standard, with Jeremy Pelt on trumpet, Rick Germanson on piano, and Richie Goods on bass. The one important change in the line-up was a young altoist named Julius Turnitino; it seems Vincent Herring, who played in Nat Adderley’s own groups and is most frequently called upon to pinch-hit for Cannonball, is working with Cedar Walton at Dizzy’s this week.

The Adderley brothers’ blend of bright, happy bebop was extended by Nat for 25 years after Cannonball’s death; today, the Cannonball and Nat legacy is kept alive by Mr. Hayes. The Jazz Standard group was, to borrow a phrase from Charlie Ventura, truly a “bop for the people” band, in that it played uncompromised modern jazz but with funky, finger-snapping grooves and a strong emphasis on melody. The Cannonball Legacy Band also featured “One for Daddy-O,” a snappy blues named for a Chicago deejay, and a Parker-like rendering of “What Is This Thing Called Love,” lately the favorite Cole Porter offering among the beboppers.

The quintet is driven by Mr. Hayes, whose drumming is still as irresistibly propulsive as it was back when he was heard on virtually every other classic Blue Note album. Mr. Pelt took the main solo in Nat Adderley’s lesser-known “Natural,” a tune closely related to Miles Davis’s “Four.” Increasingly, Mr. Pelt (as he also showed last week at Smoke with Joan Stiles’s sextet) is becoming a trumpet soloist of distinction, playing with more individual style and even — rare for a musician well under 40 —realizing the value of space and of not trying to play everything at once. He is certainly the dominant soloist in the group, although Mr. Goods played a commanding solo on the blues, and Mr. Germanson took the spotlight for an Ellington medley. The latter, done as an unaccompanied piano solo, had little to do with the Adderleys (although Cannonball did record an album of Ellingtonia in 1958), but since he closed with the magnificent “Single Petal of a Rose,” I wasn’t about to gripe.

Likewise, I’m not about to object to the tradition of honoring major musicians on round-number birthdays; I’m waiting for Grachan Moncur, Archie Shepp, Carol Sloane, Reggie Workman, James Spaulding, and all the other classic 1937 babies to get their due.

wfriedwald@nysun.com