*** BRANFORD MARSALIS, “The Dark Keys,” Columbia; *** JOSHUA REDMAN, “Freedom in the Groove,” Warner Bros.

It’s a good month for jazz when two of the music’s finest young saxophonists release albums within a few weeks of each other. But what makes these recordings even more intriguing is the alternating views they provide of two very different careers in players whose musical skills and musical styles have much in common.

Marsalis--at 36, nine years older than Redman--had a shot at major public visibility when he led the “Tonight Show” band for the first 2 1/2 years of Jay Leno’s tenure. Some musicians might have used similar positions as vehicles to achieve big-time commercial success. But Marsalis elected to leave the show, initially to concentrate on his crossover jazz/pop/hip-hop group, Buckshot Le Fonque, and more recently to get back to mainstream jazz playing.

Even in his return to traditional music, however, Marsalis has insisted upon doing things his own way. “The Dark Keys” is a courageous and risky outing in which Marsalis performs on six of its eight tracks with only bassist Reginald Veal and drummer Jeff “Tain” Watts as accompaniment (saxophonists Joe Lovano and Kenny Garrett also join Marsalis for one track each).

Marsalis’ intentions with the album are signaled in the title track, which opens with a leitmotif reference to John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.” As the number progresses, and Marsalis continues to expand the envelope of his improvisation, his desire to present a kind of pure, Coltrane-esque focus upon his improvisations becomes crystal clear.

A horn player working with bass and drums bears a tremendous responsibility. Lacking a chordal instrument--piano or guitar, for harmony and texture--or another horn to afford contrast, the soloist is faced with wide-open spaces to fill. But it’s no problem for Marsalis, whose gift for composing harmonically provocative lines and triggering solos that vary quick, melodic fragments with stretched-out virtuosic displays results in consistently fascinating performances.

And, on his original “A Thousand Autumns,” Marsalis further enriches this compelling recording with a lovely, emotionally touching ballad. It’s probably not the sort of CD that will produce huge sales numbers, but there’s no denying its appeal as state-of-the-art contemporary jazz.

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The Redman album, on the other hand, can be expected to generate major sales, indeed, for Redman is rapidly becoming one of the most visible and prosperous young jazzmen in the country. Like his best-selling “Mood Swing,” it has the look of a major success and will receive the benefit of a pop music-style sales campaign from Warner Bros. (See story, Page 5.)

Although there are times when Redman sounds very much like Marsalis, he obviously has vastly dissimilar goals. “Freedom in the Groove,” unlike “The Dark Keys,” is not a risky album.

Working with a quintet that includes guitarist Peter Bernstein as a front-line partner, Redman has devised a group of tunes filled with easygoing rhythms and catchy melodic hooks. The mood is energetic, the music’s flow is irresistibly foot-tapping, and the compositions make excellent use of the timbral colors available in the tenor saxophone/guitar combination. Even without Warner Bros.’ marketing strategy, this would be a highly successful recording.

But the accessibility of the music in no way diminishes Redman’s accomplishments as a soloist. On nearly every track he plays with nonstop imagination and vitality, animating the pop- and funk-oriented settings with a crisp dose of improvisational creativity and stretching out freely in the deeper jazz works (note the references to Ornette Coleman in his alto work on “Invocation”).

He is not yet quite as musically mature as Marsalis, and his ballad work lacks emotional layering. In other settings, however, he has taken giant steps toward the creation of an attractive, original voice--and away from the sometimes repetitious arc of ideas that tended to restrict his earlier improvising.

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