The Wayne Shorter Quartet at the Rose Theater Since forming a dozen years ago, the Wayne Shorter Quartet has held to a rigorously thorough standard of discovery, welcoming not only flashes of inspiration but also irresolute pauses, stubborn quandaries and heady longueurs. At its best, the band makes this process feel intuitive, creating cycles of action and implication. And so it went in a magnificent and volatile performance at the Rose Theater on Friday night, the first of two sold-out concerts presented by Jazz at Lincoln Center. The quartet, with Mr. Shorter, 78, on tenor and soprano saxophones, Danilo Pérez on piano, John Patitucci on bass and Brian Blade on drums, prizes the give and take of collective improvisation even when it has written material to work with, as it did here. Over an hour and 40 minutes, the frame kept changing, but rather methodically: about every five minutes, a theme would run its course or stop short, leaving someone in the band, usually Mr. Pérez, to begin a new thread, which he did with classical poise. Or the onus would fall instead to Mr. Patitucci, who dug deep into his bass lines, establishing a trancelike center of gravity. During the first 40 minutes, he played ostinatos with their downbeats either missing or displaced: a destabilizing strategy, its effect intensified by the terse but playful indirection of Mr. Blade's drumming. Then came the inverse of that strategy, with a groove in which the downbeat was the only hard constant: an exclamation point at the beginning of the sentence, delirious in its insistence. Mr. Blade was the band's designated mischief-maker, when he wasn't operating as a combustion engine. He's capable of so much supple suggestion, just barely grazing his cymbals and snare, that when he really lets loose it feels like a body blow. This happened near the concert's half-hour mark, during a piece that had the rest of the group calmly repeating quarter notes in an ascending arpeggio. Mr. Blade took this dispassionate figure as his cue to run a fever: slashing and fuming, he seemed almost to lose his bearings. Through it all, against many layers of turbulence, Mr. Shorter's intent rang clear: a bold, elegant form under extraordinary pressure, like a deep-sea lanternfish or a Calatrava bridge. He played a few familiar themes, but not many; when he flirted with the melody of "Footprints," after nearly an hour of evasive maneuvers, I heard an expectant stirring in the seats around me, and some tentative applause. After a moment, Mr. Shorter moved on. His style as a soloist, on soprano as well as tenor, was less essayistic than epigrammatic: bursts of distilled insight, bracing and precise. He doesn't lead the band from out front so much as he does from within, annotating the swirl or connecting the dots in a fragmentary theme. He was selective with the braying, faintly nasal tone of his fiercest tenor playing, just as he was with the piercing jab at the higher end of his soprano range. But he played through most of the performance, and observed his sidemen intently at all times, dictating nothing but influencing the outcome nonetheless. One of his early insights with this quartet was to convene musicians whose affable virtuosity could humanize the forbidding side of the music. It was only in the encore, a version of "Joy Ryder," that he showed how staggeringly concise this band can be, given certain marching orders. But concision isn't the aim for Mr. Shorter now, no more than nostalgia. He's interested in the spirit of expedition, and in its power to transform even familiar materials. Hours before Friday's concert, a space shuttle had been spotted gliding above the New York skyline, on the back of a 747. Which, as accidental emblems go, feels just about right.