"We’re not puppy dogs up here!", Branford Marsalis good-naturedly admonished the sold-out house at Symphony Hall a week ago last Monday night. Marsalis was responding to a big audience "Awww!" after he’d said, "I love to play with my brother," and he was talking about a specific piece, Wynton’s "Hesitation," which the two first recorded more than 20 years ago in a session with Herbie Hancock for Wynton’s Columbia Records debut. "Hesitation" was a high point, the two brothers, with Branford on tenor, spiraling around Wynton’s jagged, lickety-split boppish theme like a double helix, phrases paralleling each other, overlapping in unison, splitting apart again, backed only by Reginald Veal’s bass and drummer Jason Marsalis’s fast-pattering brushes.

Billed as "Ellis Marsalis & Sons," this was the apotheosis of Marsalis-hood. Ellis, 68, led from the piano, with Branford, 42, Wynton, 41, and trombonist Delfeayo, 37, making up the front line while Jason, who turned 26 on March 4, held down the beat with Veal, the only non-Marsalis on the stage. The band are on their first-ever tour in support of The Marsalis Family: A Jazz Celebration, which came out last month on Branford’s own Marsalis Music label (it’s distributed by Rounder).

As you’d expect from a Marsalis-family event, they covered the stylistic history of jazz. That ranged from Jelly Roll Morton’s "Jungle Blues" to Thelonious Monk’s "Green Chimneys," fellow New Orleansian Alvin Batiste’s "Mozartin’," several Ellis originals, Wynton’s "Hesitation," and Branford’s equally bravura "Cain and Abel." Branford and Wynton veered into the ’60s abstractions of Miles and Ornette, Ellis hung in the hard-boppish realm, and on his ballad feature, "If Only You Knew," Delfeayo, bespectacled and long-toned, conjured, of all people, Tommy Dorsey (but nixing the vibrato).

As much as any single tune, it was the accretion of small events that summed up the evening: the brothers smiling when Ellis veered off into "out" chromatic harmonies on his "Twelve’s It"; Ellis’s superb comping throughout the night, as he broadened the music’s vista with just the right rhythmic and harmonic spice in his chords; Ellis laying out when Branford took off into huffing Coltrane land on Wynton’s "Down Home with Homey"; Wynton strutting around toward the back of the stage, testing his sound off-mike against the back wall of Symphony Hall on the riotous encore "Buddy Bolden’s Blues"; Ellis on the same tune picking out the notes of the melody with a songful, laid-back legato that swung.

Branford said about playing with Wynton that it’s "not an ‘Awww!’ thing" — he’s simply never found another trumpet player who could handle "Hesitation." But maybe when talent, inspiration, and DNA mix, a bit of "Awww!" is in order.