In the heat of a great solo, many trumpet players tend to throw their shoulders back and jab their instruments in the air, like a gangster in an old movie hoisting a machine gun on St. Valentine’s Day. Hard-bop trumpeters tend to assume this position more than most, mainly because they play more notes and blast them out faster and louder. The late trumpet icon Woody Shaw often played that way. So it makes sense that Ryan Kisor and Sean Jones, two contemporary stars of the instrument who performed in a salute to Shaw at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center on Friday night, do as well.

Like his predecessors Clifford Brown and Lee Morgan, Shaw (1944-89) was a power player and a leading figure on the post-bebop trumpet scene who came to a tragically early death. Shaw was also keenly influenced by the slightly older Freddie Hubbard, who could be called the only seminal trumpet star of that generation to see the age of 50.

Shaw was born in the South (North Carolina) and raised in the North (Newark) — the first of many dualities in his music. The two established leaders with whom he was most closely associated were Eric Dolphy and Horace Silver, giving him solid credentials in two jazz areas that rarely overlap — the experimental, avant-garde jazz of Dolphy and the blues-based soul jazz of Silver and Art Blakey. Shaw was comfortable playing with just a rhythm section (a format favored by few trumpeters of any jazz generation) but at the same time, he did some of his best work with larger ensembles. He could play completely free-form, but he also was one of the most accomplished composers of his era.

Shaw recorded for the first time with Dolphy as a prodigious 18-year-old in 1963. The multi-reed instrumentalist then invited Shaw to join his group in Paris, but died suddenly of a diabetic coma before Shaw arrived. Undaunted, Shaw spent two productive years on a kind of advanced-course study in Europe. When he returned, he briefly joined the Blue Note Records stock company, where he established himself both as a player and a composer on organist Larry Young’s 1965 album “Unity.” The record introduced Shaw’s most famous composition, “Moontrane,” a tune he would rerecord as the title of one of his most famous albums in 1974, and still later with the tenor colossus Dexter Gordon.

In a discussion before the concert on Friday, which was presented as part of Tribeca’s “Lost Jazz Shrines” series, Woody Shaw III talked about his father’s interest in Tai Chi, and how the disciplines associated with meditation affected his music. The trumpeter Mark Morganelli, Shaw’s friend and frequent employer (as owner of the Jazz Forum club), recalled Shaw’s fondness for using more open intervals in his playing, often based on the cycles of fourths and fifths (as opposed to the chromatic and diatonic lines that are more easily played on the horn). Taken together, it was easy to discern the Asian influences in Shaw’s music, which was notable because most jazzmen at the time were more receptive to Latin and Brazilian sounds.

The concert opened with one of Shaw’s more Asiatic works, “Zoltan,” which began with drummer Victor Lewis powerfully laying down a march pattern. The combination of march rhythms and Asian minor chords suggested a bebop answer to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “March of the Siamese Children.”

Mr. Lewis, who played in nearly all of Shaw’s bands, was accompanied by two other veterans of the Shaw quintet — the pianist Larry Willis and bassist David Williams — and served as musical director for the evening.

He explained that he chose Messrs. Jones and Kisor — both of whom are veterans of the Jazz at Lincoln Center brass section but were born in 1978, meaning they were too young to see Shaw in person — because the burden of filling the Shaw shoes would have been too great for a single player. But he could have added that Shaw himself had a fondness for multi-trumpet ensembles.

Once they took the stage, the group admirably stuck to Shaw’s original tunes, with the exception of the standard “We’ll Be Together Again” and Mr. Willis’s Latinate melody, “Isabel the Liberator,” which the pianist had recorded with Shaw on 1979’s “For Sure!” The dual trumpet ensemble was well rehearsed, and though the tunes were not brief, the players were refreshingly succinct. Mr. Jones’s passionate playing on “Isabel” — in which the arched-back position was assumed — drew the biggest applause of the first set.

The two points to be learned from the concert were, firstly, that Mr. Shaw’s compositions elevated him above nearly everyone in his generation, and secondly, that the “Lost Jazz Shrines” series does a valuable service when it focuses on a single composer-player, especially an overlooked one such as Shaw.

“Stepping Stones,” from Shaw’s famous Village Vanguard live album, provided the overall high point. This was a fast, choppy melody line that Shaw originally played as a sort of cutting contest with the tenor saxophonist Carter Jefferson. On Friday, the two trumpeters democratically split it into two-bar phrases, playing with and against each other. It was exciting, but not bloodthirsty, in the way that the famous Morgan-Hubbard duel captured on “Night of the Cookers” was. Shaw’s music is much too congenial for that, even when two powerhouse trumpeters are digging in, leaning back, and exploring the projectile nature of their horns.

wfriedwald@nysun.com