Early in her 8:00 set at Yoshi’s San Francisco, pianist Toshiko Akiyoshi spoke in charmingly accented English about the salad days of her six-decade career. She said that after spending her youth in Japan absorbing and imitating other pianists, she eventually realized “the need to find my own idiosyncracies.”

The highly individualistic voice she discovered was on prominent display in this hard-swinging quartet gig, along with the turbo-charged sax and flute playing of Akiyoshi’s husband, Lew Tabackin. Although few were on hand to hear this stripped-down alternative to their acclaimed big band, Akiyoshi and Tabackin filled the void with a quirky, vibrant brand of high-energy bebop.

Akiyoshi’s style can take a couple of tunes to adjust to, and her unaccompanied solo break in the opening “Long Yellow Road” (Akiyoshi’s de facto theme song) was like a crash course. Swinging yet fascinatingly mercurial, her left hand sounded tart, staccato chords and sudden dissonant crashes, while her right swirled like a dust devil or fluttered willy-nilly like a butterfly, prancing unpredictably and with impish humor.

Tabackin was the dominant force through much of the set. Solid and square-jawed, bending at the waist and knees, Tabackin scuttled a few steps forward or back in frequent moments of blazing intensity. On tenor saxophone, he provided explosive outbursts linked by flowing supersonic flights, his incredible breath control making it all sound seamless. And his tribute to Coleman Hawkins in “Self Portrait of the Bean” poured out like whiskey, a gruff, bluesy ode to the night owls.

But Tabackin’s finest moment came on flute. “Autumn Sea” felt like a kabuki theatre performance, coming down from Akiyoshi’s bright, bouncing intro to a hauntingly expressive, shakuhachi-like solo, slow and vast, punctuated by stamps of Tabackin’s foot and, later, low mallet work by drummer Mark Taylor.

Taylor and bassist Peter Washington kept the sound fresh with brisk, skipping rhythm, providing just the right balance of straightforward drive and agile openness for the co-leaders’ unique east-west bop attack. It’s a sound that lingers in the ear, idiosyncratic indeed, and greatly satisfying.