Yo La Tengo at Maxwell's in Hoboken, N.J. HOBOKEN, N.J. - The victory of the three musicians in Yo La Tengo - Ira Kaplan, James McNew and Georgia Hubley - has been in part the victory of their broad enthusiasms. With rock "n" roll from the mid-1960s to the mid-"80s, they're ninjas of secondary-source material; though they're not always covering songs outright, they're building something greater than the sum of their references. They play small, careful, gentle and arranged music, and then they play big, noisy, gestural and improvised music, flicking between one and the other as if those two dispositions were connected back at the riverhead. It's a form of instruction, and liberation. When you last long enough as a band - Jesse Jarnow tells that story in his recent book, "Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo and the Rise of Indie Rock" - you can teach people to listen to the way you hear, and at the same time give them their own sense of catharsis. Yo La Tengo is in the middle of its eight-night run of Hanukkah shows here at Maxwell's, a nearly annual platform since 2001 that illustrates the band and its environment as perfectly as any concert can. More than 25 years ago this band formed in this town, building its sound within this club's acoustics. The band chooses surprise guest performers and donates to a different charity each night: this year's, logically, are hurricane relief funds. Monday, the third night, brought John Mulaney, a comedian and "Saturday Night Live" writer, and the Feelies. The Feelies are a big deal to Yo La Tengo. "If it weren't for the Feelies," Mr. Kaplan explained between songs, "we definitely wouldn't be here right now." They have the same parents: the eighth-note stomp, the drone and the structured guitar detonation. In the late "70s the Feelies, also from northern New Jersey and often at Maxwell's, figured out to some extent how to build on the Velvet Underground. In the mid-"80s Yo La Tengo figured out to some extent how to build on the Feelies. But where the Feelies suppress and subtract, Yo La Tengo expands and erupts, with Mr. Kaplan leading the charge: whether he's playing guitar or organ or singing, he becomes a passionate, spasmodic improviser, letting his nervous system lead him. And so - after an opening set by the Feelies long enough to be a top-billed performance in itself - Yo La Tengo, stretching well past midnight, grafted the older band into itself. Most of the set brought members of the Feelies onstage: in Yo La Tengo's own "Barnaby, Hardly Working" and a rearranged version of Neil Young's "Time Fades Away," the Feelies" lead guitarist, Glenn Mercer, worked his terse, ragalike solos into Mr. Kaplan's wilder and more discursive ones. In "Tired Hippo," "The Room Got Heavy," "False Alarm," "The Story of Jazz" and "Double Dare" both percussionists in the Feelies, Stan Demesky and Dave Weckerman, assumed their places in the music, if only to rattle a shaker or hit a drum. And in the Velvet Underground's "Sister Ray" both Feelies guitarists, Mr. Mercer and Bill Million, joined the band, making the sound wider and taller, with strummed rhythm and scrabbled lead. Yo La Tengo plans to release its 13th album, "Fade," next month, from which it played one song, "The Point of It," which seems to be about accepting age for what it is. "If we're getting old/ if we're not so strong," Mr. Kaplan sang, "If our story's told/ that's the point of it." But one of the benefits of enduring, within dimensions you respect, is that you learn how to manifest your ideas stronger and more clearly. Whether the songs were small and controlled - like "The Point of It" - or big and wild, the mode was seriousness and the sound was clear, detailed and extraordinary. Yo La Tengo's sold-out run continues through Saturday at Maxwell's, 1039 Washington Street, Hoboken, N.J.; (201) 798-0406, maxwellsnj.com.