Normally, I resent it when a bandleader begins a show by milking the house for applause, letting us know that he’s not going to play unless he hears evidence of real enthusiasm from the crowd. To heck with that! Cheers and whistles of approval are supposed to be a reward for a good performance, not to encourage one that hasn’t happened yet. That said, the pianist Eric Reed is one of the major exceptions to this rule. I’ve heard him play so brilliantly on so many occasions that by now I’m more than willing to extend him a little kudos on credit.

Mr. Reed’s current ensemble, performing this week at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, is a quintet he calls “Tenor Madness,” and it features a frontline of Seamus Blake and Stacy Dillard doubling on tenor and soprano saxophones, Dezron Douglas on bass, and, especially important, Willie Jones III on drums. Mr. Jones is probably the best drummer I’ve heard with Mr. Reed: The two have a way of locking down the rhythm in an especially propulsive way, which works terrifically with Tenor Madness’s hardbop-centric program. Mr. Jones helps solidify Mr. Reed’s reputation as possibly the most joyful pianist in jazz since Erroll Garner: Everything he plays is unfailingly upbeat; he can even make a minor blues ballad sound happy.

The Quintet opened the set with a declaration of allegiance to the classic Blue Note über-bop of the mid-’60s by jumping into Lee Morgan’s “Stop Start” (from “The Procrastinator”) — which, despite the title, is more the latter than the former — and “Devilette” (from Dexter Gordon’s “Club House”), which featured Mr. Douglas’s best solo of the night. Mr. Reed then interrupted the jubilant mood with a contemplative, low-key original called “Prayer,” which he dedicated to two leading jazz figures currently on the sick list: pianist George Cables and bassist Dennis Irwin.

Three more pieces followed, each of which illustrated Mr. Reed’s knack for unearthing worthy, lesser-known “heads” from the modern jazz songbook. Joe Chambers’s soulful “Third Street Jump” rested on a backbeat that was so strong, I expected the setting sun to come out again; Wynton Marsalis’s tricky and intricate “Delfeayo’s Dilemma” followed, and Donald Brown’s “Theme for Malcolm” featured a ska-reggae rhythm that whetted my appetite for the Jamaican pianist Monty Alexander’s show this weekend (also in the Allen Room).

One thing the band didn’t do was build to a big tenor-bashing gladiatorial match of the kind that Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane whipped up in the original 1956 “Tenor Madness.” But I’ll wager that nobody missed it. I certainly won’t be asking Mr. Reed to refund me any of the applause I advanced him at the beginning.

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The SFJazz Collective’s concert at Zankel Hall on Wednesday also reflected a hard bop-Blue Note bias. The focus was on the music of Wayne Shorter, and most of the pieces hailed from the mid-’60s, which I’ve always felt was Mr. Shorter’s most rewarding period. Just as no one expects the Boston Red Sox to be made up entirely of Bostonians, few of the SFJazzers are San Francisco natives or residents. Rather, the SFJC is one of jazz’s great all-star teams, comprising eight co-leaders who could each fill a club on his or her own, starting with the saxophonist Joe Lovano, trumpeter Dave Douglas, vibraphonist Stefon Harris, and pianist Renee Rosnes.

The Collective’s approach for the five years of its existence has been to celebrate an iconic jazz composer (three of the five thus far have been living and active: Herbie Hancock, Ornette Coleman, and Mr. Shorter) with fresh arrangements of the composer’s work for the eight-piece octet, as well as new compositions inspired by them. It’s occasionally difficult to hear the connections (in the way, for instance, that Mr. Shorter’s “Fee Fi Fo Fum” spins off John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps”), but in this instance, Mr. Douglas’s “Secrets of the Code” was a winner, sounding like an unreleased extra track from Mr. Shorter’s 1965 record “The All Seeing Eye.”

The octet’s new settings of Mr. Shorter’s songs were no less thoughtfully worked out than the originals; surprisingly, the group commenced the concert with his most famous line, “Footsteps,” rearranged by Ms. Rosnes as an aggressive, straight-ahead bopper rather than a modal 6/4. It was an effective opening but, I would have thought, a hard act to follow. Yet the SFJC topped it with bassist Matt Penman’s treatment of “El Gaucho.” Although the song uses a South American rhythm, “Gaucho” doesn’t sound remotely tango-ish, especially when Mr. Douglas blasts the melody with his severe trumpet tone.

Ms. Rosnes also brought out Mr. Shorter’s lyrical side on “Diana,” a lovely ballad (here featuring the alto saxophonist Miguel Zenón) that has always seemed overshadowed by the more Latin-popish antics on the 1974 record “Native Dancer.” On the haunting “Infant Eyes” (from 1964’s “Speak No Evil”), Mr. Lovano drove home the notion that, more than anything else, Mr. Shorter writes for the tenor saxophone.

The evening’s closer was a rousing “Yes or No,” arranged by drummer Eric Harland. Mr. Harris and Ms. Rosnes soloed eloquently, treating the rhythm section as a quintet within the octet, but then Mr. Harland took off in an extravagantly virtuosic percussion feature (the old problem regarding the drum sound in Zankel has apparently been rectified). It was amazing that the crowd had any applause left after a dense 90 minutes of music that seemed to cram a season’s worth of major players and tunes into a single evening.

wfriedwald@nysun.com