Guitarist and singer John Pizzarelli Jr. is one of the few contemporary jazzmen with a personality that could have commanded the old Birdland, which was hardly an intimate room. Closer in size to a Vegas showroom than to the downtown jazz clubs that then featured experimental music, the old Birdland for that reason primarily booked headliners and big bands like Count Basie.

This week, Mr. Pizzarelli has brought his 16-piece big band to the current Birdland for a six-night run — the longest I know of in the new club’s history. It’s a very tight, hard swinging group, comprising some of the finest players on the scene, including the omnipresent Scott Robinson (it’s not officially a New York orchestra unless he’s in the reed section).

The big band lets Mr. Pizzarelli express his love for Basie, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, and Frank Sinatra in the same way his guitar-piano-bass trio lets him show his love for Nat King Cole. Mr. Pizzarelli is already so entertaining with his trio that the big band can hardly make him more so. It is always a thrill, however, to hear a jazz orchestra of this quality.

The trio’s other members, bassist Martin Pizzarelli and pianist Ray Kennedy, serve as the big band’s rhythm section. Nearly all the orchestrations are by Don Sebesky, a longtime studio veteran who, ironically, is known in jazz circles for turning the great guitarist Wes Montgomery into an easy-listening superstar. (It’s an unfair claim: Some of those albums hold up pretty well.)

As it happens, the primary beneficiary of Mr. Sebesky’s fine arrangements for this band is not Mr. Pizzarelli’s voice, which doesn’t sound all that different, but his guitar work. The major joy of the evening is hearing how Mr. Sebesky weaves Mr. Pizzarelli’s guitar solos into the middle of charts that pay homage to swing classics, incorporating familiar motifs like the call-and-response pattern from “I Got a Gal in Kalamazoo” and the Goodman-Lionel Hampton descending run from “Avalon.”

Seeing as Birdland is all decked out in big wreaths and red ribbons, it was appropriate for Mr. Pizzarelli to play his treatment of “Sleighride,” in which Leroy Anderson’s straight eighth notes are reconfigured as swinging triplets. Likewise, “Winter Wonderland” is a sagacious stroke of creative jazz repertory.

Mr. Pizzarelli describes the chart as “Nelson Riddle Meets Orange-Colored Sky,” because it employs the countermelodies and vamps from Sinatra’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” themselves informed by the Bill Russo-Stan Kenton “23 Degrees North, 82 Degrees West.” “In the Wee Small Hours” borrows an arrangement sung by Sinatra on a tour with Basie but never recorded, except by

Rosemary Clooney. “The ‘Say Hey’ Kid” is an instrumental in the spirit of Charlie Christian’s “Solo Flight.”

Throughout the opening set on Tuesday, Mr. Pizzarelli was preoccupied with making sure everything was working. His singing was less involved than usual, except on a knowing treatment of “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?” But that will certainly change within a few nights. If there is anyone today with a greater ability to send a crowd home with spring in their steps and smiles on their faces, I don’t know him.

Until December 19 (315 W. 44th Street, between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, 212-581-3080).