Experimental jazz is more marginalized, and yet more essential, than ever. You probably won’t hear much of it at Lincoln Center when they open their new home in the fall (as trumpeter Dave Douglas said to me two weeks ago, “They don’t even consider what I do jazz”). Yet free-jazz techniques are more likely than ever to be utilized by the major players who today constitute the jazz mainstream.

When Ornette Coleman and his disciples first appeared on the scene 40 years ago, suspicious minds accused them of breaking the rules because they didn’t have the chops to play straight. That wasn’t true of Mr. Coleman (some of his followers are a different matter), and it’s not true of the best saxophonists today.

For all three multiple reed saxophonists who make up the super group Saxophone Summit – Joe Lovano, Michael Brecker, and the unit’s remarkable leader, Dave Liebman – free playing is just one of many options. Each embraces the whole gamut of modern and pomo styles – bebop, fusion, modal jazz. But they are especially effective in their meticulous application of outside styles – free improvisation, long-form solos, and overblown, distorted notes.

Mr. Liebman, who turns 58 next month, is having a banner year. Apart from being spotlighted on Saxophone Summit’s first album, “Gathering Of Spirits” (Telarc 83607) and with his own quartet on “In a Mellow Tone” (Zoho 200406), he is also, with the release of “Dave Liebman and Richie Beirach,” one of the youngest players to be the subject of a historical package from Mosaic Records.

A native Brooklynite, Mr. Liebman was one of the younger students of the legendary jazz pedagogue and demagogue, Lennie Tristano. He first came to the attention of the jazz world when he played with two of Coltrane’s closest collaborators, Elvin Jones and Miles Davis, in the 1970s. Although Mr. Liebman plays tenor sax and alto flute, he has concentrated for most of his career on the B-flat soprano saxophone, becoming that instrument’s most consistent spokesman since the late Steve Lacy.

I first began to regard Mr. Liebman as a major player about 10 years ago, when he served as guest soloist with Jon Faddis’s Carnegie Hall Jazz Band. That orchestra’s specialty was radical, gonzo versions of jazz classics and familiar tunes. Jim McNeely’s recasting of Benny Goodman’s “Sing, Sing, Sing” was one of its signature successes. Mr. Liebman reconceived this Louis Prima composition in the style of Albert Ayler, filling it with freak effects and ear-splitting screams. Yet he kept it true to Goodman – perhaps because it swung, swung, swung. He and Mr. Mc-Neely knew enough about tradition to simultaneously respect the piece and stand it on its ear.

The title track on his new album, “In a Mellow Tone,” is a similar upending of a standard, and his treatment of the Ellington classic shows that you don’t have to get all loud and screechy to be radical. He acknowledges his mentor, Tristano, on “Wow” and, in tandem with guitarist Vic Juris, revisits the late pianist’s early experiments in contrapuntal free improvisation. He even takes on “My Heart Will Go On (Theme from ‘Titanic’)” – the first time anyone has made the dismal James Horner line seem anything other than a disaster on the scale of the incident that inspired it.

The Mosaic Select box, including live recordings from a 15-year period beginning in 1976, shows Mr. Liebman and pianist Richie Beirach in three settings. The first is with Lookout Farm, a band Mr. Liebman and Mr. Beirach formed while Mr. Liebman was still playing for Miles Davis. Like much of the work by Davis’s one-time sidemen, these tracks reflect Davis’s influence in hard-edged, essentially modal playing with an electric rhythm section.

The second disc, documenting the two principals in a soprano-piano duo, is considerably more intimate. It climaxes in an extremely abstract, half hour long session called “Invocation.” The third disc features Mr. Liebman with his quartet Quest. This is the closest thing in the box to straight-ahead bop, and under normal circumstances would be my main reason for recommending the box. But I have to admit that Lookout Farm’s contribution was a surprise – one of the least-dated electric groups of the fusion era.

Throughout these recordings Mr. Liebman’s other specialty, world (particularly Indian) music, comes to the fore. But this is a specific focus of a recent recorded concert with sitarist and singer Nana Simopoulos. So the title “Gathering of the Spirits” implies not only an encounter between three of the most formidable living reed masters but an assembling of all the techniques available to contemporary players.

They start with “Alexander the Great,” a basic bop variation on “Bye Bye Blackbird” in which the trade of fours between the two tenors and one soprano is the expected highlight. “India” is Coltrane’s 1961 exploration of what Mr. Liebman identifies as the “F-based mixolydian scale,” in which the three principals play various international variations on the wooden flute. Mr. Liebman’s “Tricycle” is a completely free 17-minute outing in which the three tenors solo unaccompanied and interact with each other.

Although not as hair-raising as their full-length reinterpretation of Coltrane’s “Meditations” suite at Birdland two years ago, Saxophone Summit’s recorded debut is a very impressive rarity – an all-star gathering of souls, spirits, and saxophones that adds up to more than the sum of its parts.