When Wayne Shorter appeared with his then-new acoustic quartet at the Newport Jazz Festival a couple of years ago, he did more listening than playing. Reticence was not unusual for Shorter, who had done disappearing acts from his own music before, but in his absence, and despite the game efforts of pianist Danilo Pérez, the music of this new line-up had no center. Now, following the release of Footprints Live! in 2002 and the brand new Alegría (both on Verve), and a couple of years of tours, the quartet has jelled, and its 90-minute set at the sold-out Berklee Performance Center Sunday night was a profound highwire act that kept its footing while risking at every turn a free-improv shambles.

If you were on your toes as a listener, you could catch fragments of various Shorter compositions from over the years — " Footprints, " " Atlantis, " " Ju Ju, " " High Life. " But backstage after the show, even the musicians were confused about what had been performed, and in what order. Had they played " Aung San Suu Kyi, " Shorter’s dedication to the Nobel Prize–winning Burmese dissident? Well, " he just mentioned it, " said bassist John Patitucci. Instead, Shorter free-associated a set that shuffled images from his entire career, and this time his bandmates were full partners in creating a dreamlike musical logic. Despite occasional ostinato patterns from Pérez and Patitucci, meters shifted constantly into free-pulse surges that were stoked by Brian Blade’s drumming, and only once, in the " High Life " encore, did I catch Blade playing an intermittent 4/4 on his high hat.

For the most part, Shorter’s own playing, though minimalist, was forceful. He picked out simple patterns and melodies on tenor sax and soprano, occasionally embellishing them with flurries, but clearly leading. His melodies and rhythms gave Pérez enough material to fashion long arcs of chordal progressions, or thick syrupy lines of single-note runs that Shorter shadowed with his own playing. A two-note cue from the leader was enough to bring the outfit together in a dramatic unison cadence, or send everyone climbing in register and volume to a high point that would throw Shorter back on his heels with a little hop as he whipped the horn from his mouth. His playing grew more forceful through the night, the notes coming in a torrent in the set-ending " Ju Ju, " and his sound — that pure, ethereal soprano, with its stuttering phrasing, the nubby texture of his runs on tenor — showed why a handful of his notes is still worth pages from most other saxophonists.