A charged and tingly curiosity preceded the guitarist Marc Ribot’s opening set at the Village Vanguard on Tuesday night. The room was packed tight, and the air thick with anticipation: this would be Mr. Ribot’s first engagement as a leader at the Vanguard, which is still a coveted milestone for almost any jazz musician. And his trio, with the bassist Henry Grimes and the drummer Chad Taylor, suggested both a convulsive departure from the club’s center-lane programming and the reverent ennobling of a chapter in its history.

So would the set be an incursion? A manifesto? A séance?

Mostly it was a rough astonishment, restless and altogether riveting. Mr. Ribot and his partners played forcefully but with lurking sensitivity, and an almost scary commitment to cohesion. It was the kind of flag-raising first set that makes you wonder what’s in store as the week rolls on. (Wednesday’s first set was broadcast live on WBGO-FM (88.3), and archived at npr.org.)

Mr. Ribot, 58, is famously a musician of chameleonic skill, equally at ease with the dusky Americana of a T Bone Burnett production as he is with the scrabbling provocations of John Zorn. He evidently approached this engagement with mystified gratitude — “I always figured that I was a jazz musician in the same sense that Cindy Sherman was a fashion model,” he said in an interview published in this week’s Village Voice — but that doesn’t lessen his appreciation of the setting or its legacy.