Many of the jazz outfits that come into Scullers overwhelm the small, intimate, wood-paneled room, playing louder than they have to. The Wynton Marsalis Septet is another matter. This is a superbly balanced ensemble that has always prided itself on dynamic control. A week ago last Thursday there wasn’t enough room on the stage (with its Yamaha seven-foot grand piano) for the four horns on the front line to form one of their little half-moon crescents around a single microphone, as they have in past performances at other venues. But they did play decidedly "off-mike," and their first, beautifully voiced chord hit the room like a soft, aromatic cloud.

The entire second set was like that. Not that we didn’t get plenty of up-tempo musical fireworks. There were two numbers from the 1999 The Marciac Suite (Columbia): "Jean-Louis Is Everywhere," with its bluesy multi-section theme full of tricky stop-times and breaks, and the ballad "Mademoiselle D’Gascony." As usual, Marsalis couldn’t resist telling the audience how "hard" the music was, particularly "Jean-Louis." ("It has a lot of parts to it. That’s the kind of stuff that gets called ‘pretentious,’ but musicians call it ‘hard.’ ") There were two pieces by Thelonious Monk ("Hackensack" and "Ba-lue Bolivar Ba-lues-are") and an encore number, "Speed," that Marsalis said was meant to mimic a foot race where everyone eventually drops out except the winning "runner" — played, of course, by the trumpet (the piece was written for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater). Here he was as good as his word, playing a lot of "hard" fast chord changes, curling his breathless extended lines around the end of every chorus, plugging in a mute for the patter-aria finale.

But the high point of the evening was Marsalis’s original New Orleans funeral piece The New Orleans Function, from his artistic breakthrough album, 1989’s The Majesty of the Blues (Columbia). It was another of his beautifully designed blues, and another of his arguments that the form is all but inexhaustible. The suite concludes with the up-tempo second-line "Happy Feet Blues," but it was the slow first section, "The Death of Jazz," that provided the most drama. In the statement of the theme, Victor Goines’s high-note clarinet break emerged from the ensemble with chilling effect, reminiscent of Barney Bigard’s high-notes on Ellington’s "The Mooche." With drummer Herlin Riley providing slow, dry rolls and choked cymbal crashes as tension-inducing accompaniment, each soloist took his turn — trombonist Ron Westray, pianist Richard Johnson (until not long ago a fixture at Wally’s on Mass Ave), and Marsalis. Each player seemed to want to outdo his predecessor in terms of softness, right down to Marsalis’s plunger-muted fluttering trills and whimpering shakes. There were huge bursts of applause after each solo, and cries of "preach," but mostly there was a rapt, attentive silence.