When the vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson, who is appearing this week at the Blue Note, first began recording for Blue Note Records in 1963, nearly all of his sessions (originally as a sideman for Jackie McLean, Eric Dolphy, and Andrew Hill) were part of that label’s early forays into the avant-garde. It didn’t take long for Mr. Hutcherson to be acclaimed as the leading vibes player of the “New Thing” movement of the 1960s — what Milt Jackson was for bebop and Lionel Hampton and Red Norvo were for swing.

However, it soon became clear that no single jazz movement — even one as open-ended as “post modernism” — was capacious enough to contain all of Mr Hutcherson’s enormous talent Through the years, he’s played every variety of modern jazz, both inside and out; his new project would be considered conservative in light of the radical music of the 1960s — and gloriously so.

On virtually all of his many al bums (22 in the 1960s and ’70s for Blue Note alone), Mr. Hutcherson has proved himself a talented composer; the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, in fact, recently played a big band adaptation of his most famous tune, the widely recorded “Little B’s Poem.”

“For Sentimental Reasons” (on the new Kind of Blue label), however, is a triple milestone for Mr. Hutcherson: it’s his first album of the decade, his first collection of ballads and standards, and, perhaps most important, his first recording with the remarkable quartet he has led for the last few years, with Renee Rosnes on piano, Dwayne Burno on bass, and Al Foster on drums. At the same time, Mr. Hutcherson is also the subject of an outstanding new reissue, “Mosaic Select 26: Bobby Hutcherson,” which shows that he was making exceptional music even during a rough time in the history of jazz.

To his credit, the 66-year-old Mr. Hutcherson didn’t hawk the new album and rarely even spoke on Tuesday, except to introduce the quartet and his special guest, the guitarist Russell Malone. Instead, he offered a combination of ballads contrasted with a few faster boppers and blues from his recent repertoire. Adding guitar to a vibes-and-piano combination gives the group the same instrumental shape as the famous George Shearing Quintet, and as with that celebrated combo, the primary concern is that all three melodic-harmonic instruments in the frontline stay out of one another’s way.

The interplay among the three primary soloists was outstanding. Mr. Hutcherson called the shots and set the tone for each of the seven pieces, without necessarily dictating that anyone specifically follow him. On the opener, Fats Waller’s “Jitterbug Waltz,” all three, as well as Mr. Burno, soloed with distinctly melodic variations, each finding his or her own approach to the tune. Mr. Hutcherson played the melody softly, as if it were a natural consequence of the chords and rhythm and he was merely following the flow. Contrastingly, Mr. Malone phrased the tune in a more agitated, against-the-grain fashion, deliberately accentuating all the notes that Mr. Hutcherson had chosen not to play.

Among the other tunes from the album, Mr. Hutcherson also played “I Thought About You” as if the goal were to reduce it to the absolute minimum of notes it would need to maintain its melodic identity; on “Embraceable You,” the idea was to delay a direct statement of any part of the Gershwin tune for as long as possible. Mr. Hutcherson played “I Thought” as spare as I ever want to hear it, and Mr. Malone held his own by soloing in nothing but complex chords.

In between the ballads, the fivemember quartet delivered Duke Ellington’s “Take the Coltrane” (from the 1962 meeting of the two giants) with fiercely aggressive blues playing, pushing the music to the edge of distortion. On the 6/4 modal piece “Highway One,” Mr. Hutcherson pounded his mallets with the jubilation of a little boy bouncing on his parents’ mattress. He wound up with another personal perennial, his samba-fied treatment of Victor Young’s “Song of Delilah,” which makes it seem like the title song from a movie set in the Caribbean rather than in Biblical Babylon.

The new Mosaic box is a standout in that it consists of five LPs (spread over three CDs) that were almost completely ignored when they were originally recorded between 1974 and1977. Ironically, they were overlooked because they were too good — straight-ahead and boppish at a point when the marketplace was dominated by attempts to electrify jazz.

All five of these projects see Mr. Hutcherson realizing his compositional abilities — and holding his own as an improviser — with at least one or two horns, including the famous Harold Land and Woody Shaw, and the lesserknown but worthy saxophonist Manny Boyd, who worked consistently with Mr. Hutcherson in this period. The late saxist plays especially well as the lone horn on the albums “Waiting” and “The View From the Inside”; the latter is, despite the use of some dated funk grooves and electric piano, a lovely set of mostly original compositions in a meditative mode, inspired partly by the death of Mr. Hutcherson’s mother.

The package climaxes with the 1977 album “Knucklebean,,” a resolutely bop-based set featuring Boyd and three other horns, notably the formidable Freddie Hubbard. On Mr. Hutcherson’s signature, the jazzy waltz “Little B’s Poem,” which is wonderfully arranged for the four horns, Mr. Hubbard emerges stealthily from the ensemble, then blasts away, muted but undiluted, in a solo that would ordinarily steal the show. Yet even Freddy Hubbard, for all of his power, is unable to take the play away from the amazing Bobby Hutcherson.

***

“Betcha Bottom Dollar” (Verve), the first album by the British trio the Puppini Sisters, is weakened by an overdependence on the arrangements of the Andrews Sisters. In person at the Oak Room, where they are playing for the next two weeks, their act is more closely modeled on the Ritz Brothers.

The three lasses have obviously studied such madcap musical zanies as Louis Prima & Keely Smith, the Treniers, and the Vagabonds in constructing a high-energy, highcamp show built as much around physical choreography as musical arrangements. They bounce about the stage, banging on toy instruments, prancing like ponies, growling out the slow blues with buttshaking emphasis and retooling every tune for maximum silliness.

The most rewarding moments of their act come when the group takes an 1980s pop trifle and dresses it up in ’40s drag, most amusingly on the Bangles’ “Walk Like An Egyptian” (a title they take literally) and “Wuthering Heights,” Kate Bush’s bruisingly satirical riff on another sister act, the Brontës.

The show could use a few ballads — as of now, it consists entirely of relentless cheekiness in the same tempo — perhaps even delivered as solos by the three (Marcella Puppini, Kate Mullins, Stephanie O’Brien). What one really wants to hear in the Oak Room is a good song sung well, and if the Puppinis can reach the point where the musical and emotional resonance of their act keeps pace with their ingenious shtick, they’ll really have something.

wfriedwald@nysun.com