When CBGB’s closed its doors a few months ago, I shed no tears. Let’s face it, the place was more of a cultural “happening” than a musical shrine. I went there, like everybody else, a zillion times in the ’70s and ’80s, but I don’t recall ever hearing great music, pop or otherwise. The downtown club whose demise I sincerely mourn, however, is the Knitting Factory. Yes, there is still a venue bearing that name, currently located on Leonard Street, which presents some kind of music, I guess. But it is not even a shadow of the great jazz club that opened almost 20 years ago on Houston Street. This was the club where thousands of future lifetime fans experienced David Murray, Don Byron, Joe Lovano, Sonny Sharrock, Marty Ehrlich, Tim Berne, John Zorn, and dozens of other major creative musicians for the first time.

Most of all, I remember the Microscopic Septet. There is occasion to reminisce about this remarkable band, which flourished in the ’80s, not only because all of the group’s commercial recordings and many of its previously unreleased tracks were collected into two double-CD packages this fall (“Seven Men in Neckties” and “Surrealistic Swing” on Cuneiform Records), but because the band is doing a reunion tour that includes two nights at Joe’s Pub this Friday and Saturday.

Co-led by two composer-instrumentalists, the soprano saxophonist Philip Johnston and the pianist Joel Forrester, the Microscopic Septet were four saxes with piano, bass, and drums — an instrumentation variously described as a saxophone quartet plus rhythm, or a big band minus brass. No other group comprised all four basic members of the sax family: soprano, alto, tenor, and baritone. Mr. Johnston’s primary influences were swing-era stalwarts such as Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington, as well as Steve Lacy, the postmodern icon of the soprano sax. Mr. Forrester was a protégé, somewhat, of Thelonious Monk, and shared a patron with him in the famous “jazz baroness,” Pannonica de Koenigswarter.

Back in the day, reviewers and fans had a field day in trying to describe the band’s music, and we generally talked about its inherent contrasts: the way the Micros, as they were affectionately nicknamed, simultaneously sounded like a retro swing band (though apart from the Widespread Depression Orchestra, the form had yet to be invented) and an avant-garde ensemble. Likewise, the band was at once capriciously whimsical and deadly serious, as if it were playing in a Fellini-esque circus and a New Orleans funeral at the same time, with intricately arranged original compositions that frequently incorporated long, free-form improvisations.

The Micros’ pieces, which might, for instance, combine stride piano with Albert Ayler-like shrieks, were surrealistic in the same sense that a painting of a man with a tree growing out of his head is surrealistic. In his notes to the Cuneiform package, Mr. Johnston quotes an unnamed pundit who likened the Microscopic Septet to “Lawrence Welk on acid,” but they are no less like Spike Jones on prozac or Benny Carter on steroids.

The group emerged in 1982, around the time Wynton Marsalis was heralding what eventually became known as jazz neo-classicism, when younger players were encouraged to explore more traditional forms like bebop and swing. Early on, the movement was resoundingly denounced by the Chicago critic Larry Kart, who claimed that in trying to play older styles, musicians had to forget much of what they knew. True, but to me that doesn’t make it any less valid: A jazz pianist trying to play Jelly Roll Morton accurately shouldn’t quote Bud Powell any more than a classical keyboardist should play Bach like it was Bartók.

By contrast, the compositions written by Messrs. Johnston and Forrester did not involve forgetting, but remembering seemingly every piece of music they had ever heard. It wasn’t just that the two musical directors merely mix-mastered various kinds of jazz, but that their grasp included rhythms from all manner of ethno-world music, classical, and lots of rock and R&B.

Typical is “the Dream Detective” (from the 1988 album “Beauty Based on Science”), which begins as a baroque fugue and evolves into a bluesy feature for the baritone saxist Dave Sewelson, who quotes the “Get Smart” theme; it’s also one of many pieces included in the new four-CD set that makes use of blues-derived stop time, in which one sax solos while the others punctuate the surrounding air with short jabs of notes demarcated by wide open spaces of silence.

At times Messrs. Johnston and Forrester seemed to be reaching for as many different kinds of rhythms as they could possibly find, as such witty, Raymond Scott-like titles as “March of the Video Reptiles” and “Waltz of the Recently Punished Catholic School Boys” indicate. Likewise, “Hofstra’s Dilemma” might be described as a Monk-ish waltz — except that Monk generally didn’t write waltzes, and the “dilemma” of the title perhaps refers to how the piece is actually a feature for the tenor saxist Paul Shapiro (who quotes the more famous waltz “My Favorite Things”) rather than bassist Dave Hofstra.

The Micros also played polkas, tarantellas, and, on “Boo Boo Coming,”grooved to a reggae beat. Mr. Forrester’s two shellfish-oriented titles, “Lobster in the Limelight” and “The Lobster Parade,” both utilize Afro-Cuban rhythms, and the latter detours through a “shout” chorus similar to the Beatles’ “Hey Jude.” “Lazlo’s Lament,” spotlighting the alto saxist Don Davis, is a Gypsy-style tango; “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” was its mama, and “Hernando’s Hideaway”was its papa. “A Strange Thought Entered My Head” re-imagines Kurt Weill’s re-imaginings of American jazz in his Berlin theater music of the ’20s, or Charles Mingus playing “Dreigroschenoper.”

Regretfully, the Micros never recorded more of their idiosyncratic treatments of works by composers outside the band, apart from Mr. Johnston’s radical remake of “Johnny Come Lately,” which emphasizes the blues strengths of the Billy Strayhorn classic and erupts in a loud, pendulous stop-time chorus.

By comparison, Mr. Forrester’s reassessment of Monk’s “Crepuscule With Nellie” is considerably more faithful, capturing Monk’s mood before steering into a more harmonically free piano and bass episode.

The new Cuneiform packages also include a number of previously unreleased odds and ends, such as Mr. Forrester’s theme for the NPR series “Fresh Air” (heard in both major and minor takes), a 1981 session with John Zorn, the band’s original altoist, and “You Know What You Know,” originally intended as a “pop” single, which features both a tenor solo and a vocal by Mr. Shapiro. Like so much of the best music of the Microscopic Septet, it somehow manages to swing and to rock at the same time.

wfriedwald@nysun.com