Paul Simon With the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra Paul Simon performing on Thursday night. Transformations, extrapolations and a few collisions were on the program when Paul Simon performed with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra on Thursday night at the Rose Theater, part of a three-night fund-raising series. With tickets costing hundreds of dollars, perhaps it was no coincidence that the first words Mr. Simon sang were "She's a rich girl," from "Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes." Mr. Simon and Wynton Marsalis performed and brought their bands together for a concert of Simon songs at Jazz at Lincoln Center. Mr. Simon, not usually one to cede control of his music, brought his own band to perform side by side with the Lincoln Center big band led by Wynton Marsalis. Mr. Marsalis noted that Mr. Simon was playing (and paying his band for) "three concerts for absolutely no money." It was all about arrangements, old and new: easing in and out of Mr. Simon's usual band versions or completely revamping the songs. In the course of the night, the Lincoln Center band became a tag team, a beefed-up horn section, a new perspective and, now and then, a fifth wheel. As Mr. Simon sang, he breezed through the alterations to songs he has been singing for decades, toying with the timing of familiar lines to keep them conversational and immediate. The program didn't focus on the Simon songs closest to jazz; it didn't include, for instance, the chromatic labyrinth of "Still Crazy After All These Years." Instead it favored his folky and rock-tinged repertory, his three-chord marvels. Nearly all of the new arrangements were by the orchestra members, and they had a hard act to follow: Mr. Simon's meticulous originals, with their ingenious cultural hybrids and ever nimble rhythms. His music is tightly wound, and within it are hints and implications that the big-band arrangements could pick up, and did. The orchestra's bassist, Carlos Henriquez, heard the jubilant big-band mambo just under the surface of "Late in the Evening," and he bridged South African bounce and big-band swing in "Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes." Ted Nash, a saxophonist, surrounded the Afro-Brazilian core of "Crazy Love, Vol. II" with spiraling, twittering saxophones. And the saxophonist Victor Goines's arrangement of "Take Me to the Mardi Gras," sung by Aaron Neville and segued into Huey Smith's "Rockin" Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu," flaunted the orchestra's New Orleans expertise. The trumpeter Marcus Printup's version of "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover" had trumpets and trombones sassing the chorus. Along the way, the concert underscored the difference between jazz and pop arrangements. Jazz arrangements show off the ensemble; pop arrangements show off the song. It's the difference between thinking "Wow!" and finding yourself singing along with the horn line of "You Can Call Me Al." But there were plenty of "wow" moments. The little cascade of guitar picking that opens "The Boxer" was turned into a kaleidoscopic rush of horns in an arrangement by the saxophonist Andy Farber, although it later tried to wedge too many melodic tangents between the lines of the song. The drummer Ali Jackson's version of "Further to Fly" meshed twittering flutes and supportive horns into the Afro-Brazilian pulse. Mr. Marsalis's arrangement of "Slip Slidin" Away" moved it from gospel toward a convincing jazz shuffle. But in "The Sound of Silence" - for just Mr. Simon, Mr. Marsalis and Mark Stewart on cello - Mr. Marsalis's obbligatos took a sauntering, traditional-jazz approach that didn't match the song's loneliness as well as, say, a pensive Miles Davis tone might have. Inevitably there were spots where the heft of the big band just cluttered things. The trombonist Vincent Gardner's reworked "Bridge Over Troubled Water," though gorgeously sung by Mr. Neville, attempted lush Ellingtonian voicings but made the song fussy rather than inspirational. But this was, as Mr. Simon put it near the end of the show, "an experiment" - actually, more than a dozen of them. They didn't all work out, but those that did opened new pathways through Mr. Simon's songs.