In the past decade and a half, during which time they’ve been running, respectively, Scullers Jazz Club and the Regattabar, Fred Taylor and Fenton Hollander have operated like odd alter egos. Taylor is older and has been the more visible. He’s the Boston boy, who made history with a home recording of the Dave Brubeck Quartet at the old Storyville club in Kenmore Square and, in the ’70s, ran the legendary Paul’s Mall/Jazz Workshop complex. He’s also got a taste for Borscht Belt humor and isn’t above appearing in front of the Scullers crowd in a chicken suit if the occasional calls for it.

Hollander has a different story. He’s a New York kid, a former architect who graduated from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Peering over his reading glasses at a Regattabar or Water Music event, he’s like an understated, courteous headmaster as he runs down the details of parking validation and upcoming concert events. And his dreams as a kid were not necessarily of jazz. His mother was a nurse who for a time lived in Greenwich Village and had known the legendary Joe Gould, the bohemian bum philosopher later made famous by Joseph Mitchell’s stories in the New Yorker. And as she told him about Gould, Hollander dreamed of nights in the big city, with strange people and wonderful events.

That’s what he’ll tell you he’s in the music business for — not so much the music as the event, bringing a performer and an audience together and watching them react to each other and, when the circumstances are just so, to the effect of a particular venue or even a time of day, the very orbits of the sun and moon (as happened on one famous occasion). When people ask him how he got into the business, he’ll tell them only half-jokingly, “I was my high-school dance-committee chairman.”

Hollander and Water Music (the name of the company whose tasks include booking the Regattabar) are now celebrating their 30th anniversary. The first concert was June 24, 1971, but Hollander had begun giving parties in earnest with his architect buddies a couple of years before. One excursion, a party for a national gathering of architects, was to Georges Island, where dancers in Victorian dress vogued on the parade ground or formed a kickline on the fort walls. At one point, skydivers parachuted onto the field. There were society orchestras and a rock band, “but the visuals were the exciting part, the fort itself, the things we did with it,” and the fact that the 1851 fort was interesting to architects as architecture, and also because many of them had traveled from Middle America, from cities that weren’t as old as the fort.

Hollander and his pals formed the South Boston Racquet Club, a mythical organization whose real purpose was to give parties. The locations weren’t hotel ballrooms but usually unregistered wharf spaces. The club, says he now, “took reckless chances in venues where you shouldn’t have parties. . . . We did some very stupid things.” In 1968 Hollander got involved in the Eugene McCarthy presidential campaign and was production manager for a Fenway rally, and his problem-solving architect’s mind began to be drawn to events of a less frivolous sort.

Water Music began almost as a lark. An associate was running booze cruises in Boston Harbor and was sick of it. It was a kind of singles-scene meat market, though Hollander now calls it a “shark tank” because of the boat set-up (“the girls couldn’t get away”). Hollander changed it completely. He featured chamber music, woodwind octets, string quartets, four-hand piano. Listeners floated among the barges and scrap heaps of the harbor at sunset while listening to Beethoven. Hollander had begun to fulfill his dream.

And he became obsessed with the architecture, if you will, the problem-solving mechanics, of concert presentation. The first 10 years of Water Music’s career really were water-based. Hollander became expert not only in audience and performer handling, table placement, bar set-ups, and sound equipment, but in shipping schedules and tide charts. For instance, on a given night you’ve got the Wynton Marsalis Quintet performing on the top deck of the Provincetown II and the James Williams trio on a lower deck. Both bands require grand pianos, but the passageways are too small to transport pianos from one deck to the other. The only way is over the side. Yet you can get a piano onto the top deck from the pier only at low tide and onto the lower-deck gangway at only at high tide. Solution: load the first piano in the morning, before the Provincetown II makes its trip to the Cape at 8:30 a.m.; load the second piano when the Provincetown II returns at 6:45 p.m., a mere 45 minutes before the Jazz Boat crowd is set to board. Unload both pianos between 11:30 p.m. and midnight — quickly — during a “falling tide.”

“Nothing is impossible,” says Hollander, in his typically dry, epigrammatic way. “But some things are too hard to do.”

Perhaps the crowning achievement of the “water years” of his career came during the evening and early-morning hours of July 5 and 6, 1982. The plan was that early on the evening of the fifth, Water Music would present one of its Royal Fireworks concerts in the back yard of the Boston Aquarium, with Handel’s music performed by Banchetto Musicale (now Boston Baroque) as part of Harborfest, and a synchronized fireworks display over Long Wharf. After that concert, the crew would turn the chairs 180 degrees for a whole new audience that would face a complete lunar eclipse scheduled to take place at 2:38 a.m. while pianist Randall Hodgkinson played a repertoire of “moon” music culminating at the time of totality with Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. The event sold out, but it also lost money. “There was no way it could make money,” says Hollander, “but if you can do something like that, then you do it.”

There were land-based events in the ’80s — folksinger Tom Rush’s Symphony Hall concerts, jazz concerts at Jacob’s Pillow in the Berkshires, the “Jazz at the Plaza” series in the Copley Plaza Ballroom, concerts at the Crane Estate in Ipswich. In 1985, Hollander began to book the Regattabar in the Charles Hotel, a notoriously difficult room that has to serve for catering functions and as a jazz club, with its non-stage tucked under a low ceiling. Somehow over the years, Hollander has made it work, and every year the club’s schedule has gotten more dense with internationally renowned jazz names — the late Betty Carter, McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones. And of course he still runs individual concerts with stars like Sonny Rollins, Joshua Redman, and, in a couple of weeks, John McLaughlin at places like Sanders Theatre and Berklee Performance Center.

In a sense, Hollander’s concerts are more routine for him than they were in the Fireworks and Concert Cruise days, except for the number of performances (more than 300 shows a year). But he continues to plan and look for unusual bookings. And in the meantime he nurses his other problem-solving passion, direct mail.

Water Music works from a database of 162,000 names. It will mail out schedules two or three times a year, 32,000 to 42,000 at a time, honing the list from that database. Hollander was a scientist of this stuff when he had to take data down on paper, but it’s become a real obsession since his mailing list went completely digital, in 1998. Now everyone who calls has a code that shows what category of event he or she bought a ticket for (contemporary jazz or fusion, for instance, or comedy). Hollander loves working with local artists who know how to use a mailing list — Olga Roman, Sergio Brandão, Teresa Inês, Rebecca Parris, and, probably the queen of direct-mail local artists, harpist Deborah Henson-Conant.

“I always tell people: one thing about your mailing list, no one can take it away from you. If you give it to someone else, it probably won’t work for them. Keep track of where your audience is and keep in touch with them.” (Before every mailing, the entire R-Bar mailing list gets run by the National Change of Address Administration for verification.)

So when for this obsessive event planner does the love of music come into play? “One of my best evenings was listening to the Steve Kuhn Trio with Al Foster and Ron Carter. That was when Bob Blumenthal asked in his Globe review, ‘Why is it that Al Foster and Ron Carter play better when they’re with this guy?’ And it was true. It was so electric to be in a room with these people making music together.” And there was Ruth Brown, after a cancellation due to chronic cancer, returning to the R-Bar. “Whatever her doctors had done to her at that point, she was a younger person than I’d ever seen and had a wonderful time during the show, and it proved to her that she could come back.”

But, says Hollander, “the passions come at unexpected moments, because I find myself relaxed and listening at unexpected moments.” He looks forward to the upcoming John McLaughlin concert with his group Remember Shakti on June 29. “It should be hypnotic. But you can’t hypnotize somebody who’s looking over his shoulder, and I probably will be. Because I want to make sure everybody else can be hypnotized.”

GLOBE JAZZ & BLUES. In the old days of jazz-rock fusion, I would have been the first to defend the new music against all comers. Those who put down Miles’s electric period were blind not to appreciate the progressive forays of Bitches Brew and Live-Evil, or recognize that his opening solo on In a Silent Way was the equal of anything on Kind of Blue. Why were they complaining about jazz rock’s heavy backbeats when the cross-rhythms of electric Miles were far more compelling than the endless ching-chinga-ching of dotted-rhythm swing and the collective electro-improv was as freewheeling as anything in late Coltrane or early Archie Shepp? Bully too to Weather Report, and Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time, and, later, Sonny Sharrock.

This past weekend, the Boston Globe Jazz & Blues Festival turned my perceptions around. Here I was nodding in boredom to the best the new electric-jazz contingent had to offer while finding myself thrilled by the freshness, the very newness of those old fuddy-duds the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra as presided over by the prince of retrograde darkness himself, Wynton Marsalis.

The first wave of electrified goodies arrived on Saturday night at the FleetBoston Pavilion. Medeski Martin & Wood headlined, preceded by their sometime collaborators DJ Logic and guitarist John Scofield. In his Project Logic, the DJ’s the front man. For his Pavilion set-up, he and his two turntables were center stage, flanked by two keyboardists (one of whom doubled on alto saxophone and flute), with a bassist and drummer backing them up. The set-up was novel enough, with Logic’s scratching both setting up the rhythms and making pitch-perfect melodic commentary. At times, his tracks shouted out with unidentifiable vocals in response to the rest of the band. At one point, the quintet even conjured the electronic maelstroms of high-period electric Miles (before his 1974 hiatus).

But, finally, there was no there there. Saxophonist Casey Benjamin’s punchy riffs made me long for the tumbling freefalls of Sonny Fortune’s unpredictable breaks with the Davis band. Or the relentless beat of Herbie Hancock’s post-Rockit outings. It was funky, but not funky enough.

Scofield is a brainiac guitar god who’s a true switch hitter, an essential component in the post-hiatus electric Miles band, and these days someone who can deal out nylon-string pastorals, straight-ahead throwdowns with Joe Lovano, or funkified jam-band dates with MM&W. At the Pavilion he worked with rhythm-guitarist and sampler Avi Bornick, a bassist, and a drummer. The hooky riff is a Scofield specialty, so he’s a groove-band natural. At the Pavilion he had that and more — the characteristic tart bite in his chords and single-note picking, his ability to build his riff-based syntax with sustains into soaring climactic phrases.

Scofield’s jazz phrasing carries him across those abbreviated repeated riffs that make for “groove,” and on their best nights MM&W can do it too. They opened with classic organ-trio blues featuring Chris Wood on acoustic bass. But with “Big Time,” the grooves (and the electric bass) started rolling. A few years ago, when I caught them live at the Somerville Theatre, MM&W were my latter-day Miles/Weather Report dream-come-true — the grooves were laced with chaos and virtuoso derring-do. The high point may have been Wood taking a bow to his bass with screeching fury.

I missed that kind of exultation Saturday night. Billy Martin drummed with techno-speed precision, and John Medeski built up to some rhythmic-chord climaxes, but there were dead patches of free-time noodling and nothing else to grab me. I should acknowledge after more than an hour of music, I caught only the beginning of their jam with Logic and Scofield, mistaking it for a finale, only to find out that the band had continued for more than a another half-hour after I’d headed for the South Station shuttle bus.

The next day, on the humid, rainy Esplanade in front of the Hatch Shell, I fell into more of a languid torpor. I love the electric-Ornette- inspired James Carter Electric Project, but it was sunk by a bad mix and, despite a beautiful Ben Webster–like ballad from the leader, an overlong set. Vocalist Dianne Reeves was earnest and overeager in the jazz-vocalist manner (why sing “day” as one syllable when you can turn it into four, or five?).

The Hatch concert was also hobbled by rain delays, including a 30-minute shower before the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra’s appearance, but when the LCJO laid into Marsalis’s “Back to Basics,” I realized how badly I’d been suffering from funk fatigue. The “basics” of Marsalis’s tune are the blues and a palette of growls, slurs, shakes, and whooshing train noises, but what got me was its gleaming forward momentum, the Mingus-like swirl of lines and counterlines from reeds and brass, and the, oy, though I hate to say it, swing.

Marsalis has been hitting us over the head with that word for years, excluding from “jazz” anything that doesn’t meet the necessary shuffle-beat criteria. But the Hatch show made the best possible claim for swing — here were New Orleans parade rhythms, Afro-Cuban rhythms, Mingus waltzes, even a tango arrangement (by LCJO saxophonist Ted Nash) of Dizzy Gillespie’s “A Night in Tunisia.” “Back to Basics” went through the horns a section at a time — trombones, saxes, trumpets, all trading quick fours, the swing coming natural and easy at a not-too-fast tempo.

This has been the Armstrong Centennial year for the LCJO, but aside from the Gillespie and Mingus’s rarely performed “The Shoes of the Fisherman’s Wife Are Some Jive Ass Slippers,” the set was almost all Marsalis originals: “Asia Minor,” “Ruth’s Grooves,” “God Don’t Like Ugly,” and the pastel, sunset encore “Sunflowers,” its repeated long-lined melody and clap-along three-beat rhythm a self-sustaining lyric. Marsalis released a slew of recordings of original compositions through the late ’90s and into 2000 (including his epic, Pulitzer-winning Blood on the Fields). It’s gratifying, during this respite, to catch up with him.