The new Lincoln Center production of “South Pacific” is a classic, the best Rodgers and Hammerstein production in many a year, and one that was well worth the six-decade wait. Or maybe we could call it a five-decade wait. Sure, the great musical opened on Broadway in 1949, but it wasn’t until a decade later that some of the best “South Pacific”-inspired jazz reached the public.

When the original “South Pacific” closed on Broadway in 1954 after five blockbuster years (a staggeringly long run at the time), composer Richard Rodgers came up with a list of 49 different recordings — presumably not including the original Broadway cast album — of various songs from the score. This was obviously an underestimate, yet it was more than enough for the thoroughly disgusted Rodgers, who referred to the tally as “an all-time record in vulgarity.” Famously, the great Broadway composer-producer found it hard to be diplomatic when pop singers and jazz musicians kept reinterpreting his songs according to their own personal dictates.

What really must have irked Rodgers is that through the early LP era and the great decades of the Broadway “book” show (which he did as much as anyone to create), “cover” albums often reached the market before the show had opened and the official cast album had been recorded. In 1949, at least two labels released recordings of the “South Pacific” score featuring their leading lights: Decca’s version starred Ella Fitzgerald and Bing Crosby, and Capitol’s (which will soon be reissued by DRG Records) spotlighted Jo Stafford, Peggy Lee, and future Rodgers and Hammerstein movie lead Gordon MacRae.

In 1958, when 20th Century Fox was about to release the film version of “South Pacific” (the most disappointing of the studio’s six Rodgers and Hammerstein movies), the record companies were prepared and ready. The tradition of a jazz version of a popular show score had been established two years earlier with the double whammy of the “My Fair Lady” original cast album and its jazz doppelganger, by the drummer Shelly Manne with pianist André Previn. That year, at least six jazz and big band versions of “South Pacific” made it to stores alongside the film’s soundtrack, by artists ranging from the Dixieland pianist Bobby Hammack to the “progressive” West Coast drummer Chico Hamilton.

If the sailors, marines, and nurses stationed on the tiny island of Espiritu Santo, where the action of “South Pacific” transpires, ever held a dance, they’d hire Les Brown and his Band of Renown to play the music. Brown’s album, “Dance to South Pacific” (issued as half of a twofer CD on British Capitol) is by far the smoothest and creamiest jazz treatment of the score. In the ’50s, the Band of Renown was presenting what amounted to a hybrid of traditional swing and cool jazz, and most of the band’s soloists (such as the tenor saxist Dave Pell, alto saxist Ronnie Lang, and trombonist Ray Sims) were definitely in a modern mode. Throughout, the band employs exaggerated, Basie-esque dynamics and whimsy, as on “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair,” rendered by a choir of mutes and flutes.

Bob Crosby’s 1958 record “South Pacific Blows Warm” (issued thus far only on a Dot LP), with arrangements by bassist Bob Haggart, isn’t quite the masterpiece that the same team’s “Porgy and Bess” is, but it’s a contender. As ever, Crosby and his Bobcats blended unabashed Dixieland with the swing band format: “This Nearly Was Mine” is a hard-stomping whoop-up for clarinetist Peanuts Hucko, while “There’s Nothing Like a Dame” becomes a New Orleans-style parade march down Rampart Street for trumpeters Billy Butterfield and Yank Lawson (in all his muted glory), and tenor sax pioneer Bud Freeman. Every track is relentlessly bright and hard-swinging, and even Rodgers and Hammerstein’s more intimate ballads are reimagined as lusty, aggressive up-tempos.

Contrastingly, the remaining 1958 treatments of the score, featuring the unique pianist and arranger Dick Hyman, are considerably more contemplative. The only “South Pacific” jazz album ever available on a domestic CD is the most recent — a 1990 set of duets by Mr. Hyman and the iconoclastic cornetist, Ruby Braff, titled “Younger Than Swingtime.” Here, Mr. Hyman begins with a set of stride variations on “Bali Ha’i” that sounds as if Fats Waller had paid a visit to that island of revelry and debauchery (though Waller would have turned it into Harlem on the High Seas).

Listening to their expressive duos, it dawned on me for the first time that both Nellie and Emile’s key character statements are in rhythms; here, the usually chipper “Wonderful Guy” and the somber “This Nearly Was Mine” become darker and more introspectively lyrical. Braff, who had worked with Rodgers and Hammerstein onstage as a musician in “Pipe Dream,” once described the team to me as a couple of “monsters” (not that Ruby himself was always the most lovable guy). But he didn’t hold that against them, and devoted his full vocabulary of brass effects to enhancing tunes that already sounded great.

The rarest and most underrated gem in this exclusive group is Tony Scott’s “South Pacific Jazz.” For half the album, as on the minor-key “Bali Ha’i,” Scott plays clarinet in a style that suggests a midpoint between New Orleans and the avant-garde. On the rest (as on “Honey Bun”), he switches to a baritone saxophone approach that’s so aggressive it’s almost confrontational, and Mr. Hyman accompanies him on a Basie-inspired electric organ. At first, the baritone-organ numbers seem so different from the original Broadway ideas as to be almost perverse; but the more one listens, the more one becomes attuned to their inherent, inner logic: This “Enchanted Evening” is amazingly erotic, and the baritone timbre fully suggests a jazz equivalent of the de Becque character’s traditional basso register. In these last two albums, Braff, Scott, and Mr. Hyman clearly hatched their own highly effective way of bringing Nellie and Emile together.

After seeing “South Pacific” on Wednesday, I heard its famous overture again on Friday, this time from an awe-inspiring 60-piece orchestra, at the start of an all-Hammerstein program by the New York Pops, conducted and hosted by David Charles Abell. Aaron Lazar was a fine enough baritone, and the majority of both the comic (“Honey Bun”) and emotional (“Mr. Snow”) highlights were the responsibility of the peerless Sutton Foster.

The second half of the performance spotlighted the four best-known Rodgers and Hammerstein classics, but the first half explored Hammerstein’s earlier, lesser-known work with classically informed composers Sigmund Romberg and Jerome Kern. The star of the more operatic portions of the program was Rosena Hill, an exceptional soprano who effortlessly knocked out high notes with crystal clear enunciation. Together, Ms. Hill and Mr. Abell thoroughly whetted my appetite for more full-length productions of Hammerstein’s brilliant, operetta-style works such as “The Desert Song” and “Music in the Air.” She has a voice and a presence that reach way up even to the cheap seats.

wfriedwald@nysun.com