After years of working Madison Square Garden with scattered gang-bang, free-for-all shows and performances filled with hip-hop celeb-duet performances, Jay-Z has honed his concert craft to a razor’s edge.

Last night at MSG, he played a forceful gig where the looseness was lost and he let the focus stay tightly on him. The set was just as tight, featuring songs from his latest record, “Blue Print 3,” along with a heap of greatest hits from his well-worn song book.

Whether the tune was new or old, the sold-out house rapped along word for word. The urban tales, like “Hard Knock Life” and “99 Problems,” were where the fans and Mr. Z were most in synch. The show wowed from the start, with Jay rapping beneath a video array that was shaped like a chunk of New York’s skyline.

Through the entire concert, Jay paced the stage like an unleashed tiger, while images that illustrated his music flashed overhead on the mock skyscrapers.

The video graphic work during this show was so good, had Z not given as dynamic a performance as he did, he might have been upstaged by his own visuals.

He wasn’t.

In fact, his presence conjured the same kind of concert excitement and pure devotion that Sinatra managed to extract form his fans years ago and that Springsteen draws from his army today. As sacrilegious as it may seem, with everyone in Madison Square Garden raising their arms and pressing their hands together to make a diamond shape to praise Jay-Z, it’s as if the audience was experiencing the second coming.

In New York, the rapper’s hometown, Jay couldn’t do any wrong. The early peak was when he belted “Empire State of Mind,” which made the house churn.

This huge hit was such a high point, it almost made sense when he yielded the stage to Young Jeezy for a half-hour set. While that Young Jeezy interlude did dampen the concert momentum for a bit, the anticipation of another, even bigger set by Jay-Z made the second half seem like a bonus.

As for Jeezy, he’s brash and raw by comparison to Jay-Z, and his appeal was clearly with the younger members of the audience, especially the guys. Yet the rawness in Jeezy’s vocals worked against his clarity. Considering that the word is everything in rap, garbled vocals really hindered his performance.

After a duet with Jeezy on “My President,” a solo Jay-Z hit the gas pedal with a second set that featured “Bonnie and Clyde” “Big Pimping” — all powerhouse performances that seemed to build on one another.