Before his untimely death in 1961, the vibraphonist Lem Winchester was asked in an interview to name his three favorite musicians and influences. Without hesitating, he yelled out, “Milt Jackson! Milt Jackson! Milt Jackson!” Jackson (1923-99) wasn’t the first great jazz vibes player — he was preceded by the legends Red Norvo and Lionel Hampton — but he was such a colossus on the instrument that nearly all vibists of the last 60 years have used him as a starting point.

This week, Jackson is being saluted at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola in a program called “Rev-elation!” by the contemporary vibraphonist Joe Locke, who is accompanied by Jackson’s last touring rhythm section, with pianist and co-star Mike LeDonne, the drummer Mickey Roker, and the bass virtuoso Bobby Cranshaw.

What’s with the title? Dizzy Gillespie, who was Jackson’s first employer of note, once described the vibraphonist’s playing as “sanctified,” meaning it had all the passion and power of the best church music. Early in his career, Jackson performed several famously churchy collaborations with Gospel-oriented pianists Ray Charles and Horace Silver. More literally, he used a recurring theme of religious references in albums like “Plenty, Plenty Soul” and “Sermonette.” Gillespie and others of Jackson’s generation nicknamed him “Bags,” but later in life, Jackson’s younger sidemen began addressing him as “The Reverend” or “The Rev.”

“Rev-elation” is also the title of a 2005 album recorded by the quartet currently playing at Dizzy’s. The four players have been on the road in America and Europe ever since, and it shows: They don’t play like four guys who met at the sound check, but rather with the high level of interplay that was one of Jackson’s trademarks.

Jackson’s predilection for downhome style music naturally manifested itself in the blues, and, apart from two standards, virtually everything the foursome played in its opening set Tuesday night was fast blues. It also was immediately clear that Messrs. Locke and LeDonne had done their homework in assembling music associated with the late vibes master, even though Jackson never did make much of a mark as a composer. His only original jazz standard was the perennial “Bags Groove,” which the quartet performed as the closer.

But the group didn’t just play fast blues, it played at fast blues at lightning speeds: Wes Montgomery’s “Fried Pies,” John Clayton’s “Reverence,” Cedar Walton’s “Bolivia,” and James Williams’s “What You Say, Dr. J?” were each performed faster than the previous number. In his notes to the album, Mr. Locke wrote, “The notes can be copied, but no one will ever play them like [Jackson]. I would never try.” Instead, he seemed to be imagining himself in a cutting contest with the late master, as if the Rev himself were standing next to him, goading him to play faster and faster, injecting more and more energy into every phrase. Mr. Locke ended every one of his solos gasping for breath, as if he had just outraced Carl Lewis.

The first chance the quartet had to slow down was, paradoxically, on “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing),” the archetypical swing-era flag-waver that has traditionally provided bands with a motivation to play at rapid speeds. Messrs. Locke and LeDonne played it as slowly and sensually as possible, giving the repeated eighth and 16th notes at the end of each A-section (the doo-wah doowahs) a kind of Monkish openness. They also reversed expectations of time on “Young and Foolish,” customarily done as a ballad (as by Bill Evans), but done here as a bopper, in which Mr. LeDonne played tempo on top of tempo.

As mentioned, the group wound up with the familiar descending blues lines of “Bags Groove,” which Jackson always insisted was the inspiration for Neil Hefti’s theme from “The Odd Couple.”

“Rev-elation” is surely one of the most exciting jazz tribute packages around. Mr. Locke rocks and, even from the grave, Bags grooves.

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Talk about Countrypolitan: The Nashville nightingale Lari White is perhaps the first singer ever to open a show at the Algonquin with Dottie West’s 1974 “I Was Raised on Country Sunshine.” (Not to mention having her accompanist, Don Rebec, do an impression of Floyd Cramer.) But her next move is even more surprising: She plays with what she perceives as the expectations of the upscale Midtown crowd by cutting off the song before the end and announcing that, though she might be part of the country music community, she refuses to play the part of a simple, empty-headed Southern girl. “You have no idea how much energy it takes to keep up with that whole shtick.”

This is the only truly confounding part of Ms. White’s show because it isn’t clear if she really believes all New Yorkers are convinced there’s no sophistication to be found west of West End Avenue or south of Staten Island.

But then Ms. White, who has recorded half a dozen successful albums and written and produced for other artists (and who first caught the eyes of the Broadway crowd in last year’s “Ring of Fire”), is allowed a margin of experimentation because her show is very much a work in progress: Combining Broadway polish with Nashville style is a new trick for a cabaret room.

Her show is wisely book-ended by two rarely revived songs by Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin from “A Star Is Born,” and she climaxes in the middle with two elaborate story songs (Stephen Schwartz’s “Forgiveness’s Embrace” and Steven Lutvak’s “Museum”) that she transforms into pure autobiography. Thankfully, she doesn’t do the same with two other songs from hybrid musicaltheater shows about prostitutes. Regardless, she tears into all of these involved narratives, but it’s a bit of a relief when she delivers something more straightforward and hummable, like Walter Donaldson’s archetypical torcher “Love Me or Leave Me” or Johnny Cash’s Tennessee two-step “All Over Again.”

Although the show needs shaping and her patter needs work — it’s tricky to talk about oneself so much without an air of self-congratulation — Ms. White’s singing and musical acting are wonderful, doing equal justice to all the various roads she travels. She climaxes with a medley from “Yentl,” which is very nearly as powerful as when she sang it at a Michael Feinstein concert at Zankel Hall last fall (though she unwisely interrupted in the middle Tuesday night to talk about herself some more).

Now all I want is to hear Barbra Streisand sing “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” and “Coal-Miner’s Daughter.”

wfriedwald@nysun.com