Both my father, Herb, and the Village Vanguard were born in 1935. Dad has died but the Vanguard is still going strong, this week celebrating its 70th birthday as well as its status as the longest continually-operating jazz club in the world.

The two crossed paths many times, beginning when they were about 20. The club was then settling on an all jazz policy (in the early days, they also presented comics, poets, and folk singers), and Herb was a cocky collegiate. I almost never saw him take a drink, but I suspect that he’d had a few by the time he made it to the most famous basement in the world to hear Sonny Rollins. Certainly something impelled him to declare, in a loud, obnoxious voice that everyone in the Vanguard could hear, “Someone told me this place was a clip joint!”

At first there was a stunned silence, then Max Gordon, the club’s founder and operator for most of its existence, walked up to Herb’s table. He instructed the waiters to give my father anything he wanted from the kitchen or the bar (they still served food then) and not to present him with any kind of check. At the end of the evening, Max said, in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear: “Now you tell that to whoever told you this place was a clip joint!”

Gordon actually opened his first club in 1932, but launched the present room at 178 Seventh Avenue South on February 21, 1935. When he died in 1989, he passed the management of the club on to his widow, Lorraine, who continues to book all the talent and hire and fire all the club help. She’s also the bouncer, personally tossing out any scoundrel she catches using a cell phone or a recording device.

This week, Mrs. Gordon and the club have been celebrating the big sevenoh with a six-day mini-fest of favorite Vanguard headliners. It began with two star trumpeters, Roy Hargrove on Tuesday and Wynton Marsalis on Wednesday. For Mr. Marsalis, the anniversary is especially special, since in 1999 he recorded the biggest of all the hundreds of live albums taped at the Vanguard, a seven-disc set; and also appeared at the 50th Anniversary celebration in 1985.

For Mr. Hargrove, the Vanguard anniversary offered a chance to get back to his roots. The trumpeter’s most recent recordings have been with his band “The RH Factor,” a group that combines jazz-fusion with rap and hip-hop. When he stepped to the bandstand on Tuesday night, we received a clear indication that Mr. Hargrove had gone back to kicking it old-school.

He came out in a dress shirt and tie, bereft of the dreadlocks he has sported in recent seasons. The ensemble was populated by players guaranteed to help Mr. Hargrove get back to his bebop roots, including the young-ish Justin Robinson (alto sax), Dwayne Burno (bass), and Willie Jones III (drums). There were also two veteran keepers of the bop flame, Slide Hampton (trombone) and Ronnie Mathews (piano).

The band opened with a bang on “Groovin’ High,” Dizzy Gillespie’s variation on “Whispering.” The sextet’s treatment fully showed why the composer had to change the song’s name – it wouldn’t do to blast as Mr. Hargrove, Mr. Robinson, and Mr. Hampton did on a standard that’s supposed to whisper. Mr. Robinson took the lead, double-timing and even quadruple-timing on “Close Your Eyes,” with Mr. Hargrove taking the bridge.

The band cooled down a bit with Kenny Dorham’s “Blue Bossa,” in which each solo started mellow and quickly built to fever pitch. “This Is Always,” the Harry Warren movie song immortalized by Charlie Parker, was a surprising choice for a ballad, and Mr. Hargrove essayed it very romantically on flugelhorn. Monk’s “Rhythm-A-Ning” brought the speed back well above the legal limit, and Mr. Mathews received the biggest hand of the evening when he quoted from another, possibly even better-known variation on “I Got Rhythm” – namely, the television theme “Meet the Flintstones.”

Still, it wouldn’t have been entirely inappropriate for Mr. Hargrove to have brought his hip-hop-jazz fusion band to the Vanguard, considering that the Gordons have presented every variety of jazz from Dixieland to the avantgarde there during the last 70 years. It’s safe to say that anytime there’s something new in jazz, the Village Vanguard is still where you’ll hear it.

“The Village Vanguard 70th Anniversary” continues tonight with Jim Hall, February 19 with the Heath Brothers, and February 20 with the Bill Charlap Trio (178 Seventh Avenue South, at 11th Street, 212-255-4037).