When singer-songwriter Milton Nascimento was introduced at the Blue Note Wednesday night, he was described as a “living legend.” That billing is most often an exaggeration, but in Mr. Nascimento’s case, it’s an understatement.

The Brazilian superstar launched his career with “Travessia” (“Bridges”), which quickly became one of the signature anthems of Brazilian music. “Native Dancer,” Mr. Nascimento’s 1974 collaboration with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock, was one of the essential jazz albums of the 1970s. Five years ago, he won a Latin Grammy Award for his 1999 album “Crooner.” Now 63, Mr. Nascimento has recorded more than 30 albums, the latest of which, “Pieta,” has just been released in this country by Savoy Jazz (17476).

Mr. Shorter was at the height of his Weather Report period when he worked with Mr. Nascimento, and it’s easy to see what fusion players found attractive in the younger Brazilian’s compositions. His is a music of rich orchestral soundscapes: He combines and contrasts all manner of acoustic and electronic textures, voices and instruments, lyrics and wordless singing, and South and North American traditions, creating a palette of sonic colors not found in nature. Compared with the bossa-nova of Antonio Carlos Jobim and Joao and Astrud Gilberto, all born a generation earlier, Mr. Nascimento’s sound is harder-toned, more rockish, more soulful, and a lot edgier.

At the Blue Note, Mr. Nascimento worked with a sextet that included keyboards (Lincoln Continentino), both the stand-up and fender varieties of electric bass (Gastao Villeroy), a guitarist doubling acoustic and electric instruments (Wilson Lopes), a drummer playing jazz-style traps (Lincoln Cheib), a Latin percussionist (Marco Lobo), and a wind player (Widor Santiago) tripling flute, soprano, and tenor saxes. He was also accompanied by his own guitar and backup singer Marina Machado, who took the lead on “Milagre Dos Peixes” and “Cancao Do Sal.”

Like the music of New Orleans, Mr. Nascimento’s brand of Brazilian music begs for audience participation. Since there was no room for dancing at the Blue Note, the largely Portuguesespeaking crowd was content to clap, sing, and chant along. And in “Nao Me Diga Adeus” Mr. Nascimento himself descended from the stage and began chanting in the middle of the club.

I was disappointed that the group didn’t essay “Cantaloupe Island,” a track recorded alongside Mr. Hancock and Pat Metheny, but there was plenty of variety to this set.”Lilia” was a bright and bouncy ballad dedicated to Mr. Nascimento’s mother that, he said, had no lyrics (he hummed and scatted instead) “because there are no words to describe how beautiful that woman was.” Another number climaxed with a percussion solo in which Mr. Lobo unfurled a few dozen of the seemingly hundreds of items in his arsenal: shakers, gourds, tambourines, row upon row of cymbals, bells, whistles, whirling snakes, and more chains than the ghost of Jacob Marley. I just hope that when they cart all stuff from country to country that they don’t have to pay by the pound.

***

For the next two weeks at Feinstein’s, singer Mary Cleere Haran will be honoring the composer Harry Warren in a show called “Lullaby of Broadway.”This billing, she acknowledges, is ironic on several levels.

For a start, Warren (1893-1981) wrote for Hollywood, not Broadway,though his most celebrated films – Busby Berkeley’s sensual and surreal musicals – posit themselves as love songs to the Great White Way. Then there’s the title song, which Warren wrote as an exuberant, up-tempo number with the implication that even lullabies are fast in the city that never sleeps; that is how “Lullaby of Broadway”was performed in the film that introduced it (“Gold Diggers of 1935”) and in its most famous interpretation, by Tony Bennett with Count Basie.Yet Ms. Haran, who has been finetuning her Warren presentation for several years now, transforms the tune into what its title promises, slowly unfolding the 88-bar melody and making busybusy New Yorkers feel like it’s sleepy-time up North.

The centerpiece of Ms. Haran’s show, as always, is her stunning reassessment of Warren’s third Oscar-winning song, “On the Atchison, Topeka, and the Sante Fe.” Here, too, she takes what is generally done as snappy and peppy and makes it slow and intensely romantic. The song comes from the last great era of train travel and is distinguished by its incorporation of train effects on both a musical and conceptual level, as well as lyricist Johnny Mercer’s use of cinematic verbal montage. Ms. Haran shows how the song is a movie unto itself, not so much about a locomotive as the dreams it carries for cargo.

Nascimento performs again October 28 at Blue Note (131 W. 3rd Street, 212-475-8592); Haran until November 5 at Feinstein’s (540 Park Avenue, 212-339-4095).