At the NYC Winter Jazzfest, Learning How Less Can Be More

The NYC Winter Jazzfest is 15 years old, which is apparently enough time to develop its own version of “the old days.” This year it stretched on for nine days, with concert marathons on consecutive weekends and marquee concerts sandwiched in between. Of all this, the best part might have been the evening most reminiscent of what the festival had been like five or 10 years ago.

It was the Half Marathon on the event’s first Saturday, an extra night of shows organizers added to stay aligned with the Association of Performing Arts Presenters convention, using just six clubs across Lower Manhattan. (The following weekend, a more typical, two-day Marathon took over 11 spaces each night.) Fewer people came, so lines were shorter, and rooms were full but not crammed. Almost all the venues were easily walkable from each other, and it felt less like an opportunity to harvest information and more like a chance to sit with the music.

In improvised music there’s hardly the risk of repeating oneself, and one of the best things about Winter Jazzfest is running across the same artist in multiple contexts in a given night. During the Half Marathon, Joel Ross led a quintet at Subculture, perhaps the festival’s finest listening venue, a small underground theater with good sound and plenty of room to move around. Mr. Ross, 23, is the player to watch in New York this year: a vibraphonist who unites a lot of the instrument’s jazz history — from Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia and New York — and understands the vibes as a possible connector between hip-hop and West African music.

But he hasn’t totally cracked the code as a bandleader, a role that upstart musicians these days are expected to fill. His serviceable set of neatly sculpted originals only really took off near the end, when the young alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins, his frequent collaborator, assumed the lead on Mr. Ross’s ballad “Touched by an Angel.” Reflecting the pinched sound of Oliver Lake and the pith of Jackie McLean, Mr. Wilkins allowed the melody to teeter and crash, making his feelings known without overstatement.

Mr. Ross was among the most-hired players at the festival, and it was as a side musician that he shone most brightly. Later that evening, on the drummer and producer Kassa Overall’s set at Nublu, he locked into the slinky groove of “Layin’ with the Swami,” throwing things off every few cycles with a squib outside the scale. Mr. Ross was the M.V.P. sideman in this quartet, but really the honor belonged to him and Brandee Younger in tandem; her harp joined up with his vibraphone to create a single unit, woven and resounding. (They’ve done this before.)

Mr. Overall was recreating the lighthearted but heavy-grooving vibe of the Blue After Dark jam sessions at Zinc Bar, which he hosted until recently on behalf of Revive Music (he left to begin a new residency at the Jazz Gallery). The vocalist and multimedia performer Melanie Charles will take over from Mr. Overall, later this month, and on Friday, during the full marathon, she performed at Mercury Lounge, where Revive curated a stage.

Ms. Charles sang original music, sometimes from behind a deck of electronics, making a kind of astro-hydraulic pastiches in both Haitian Creole and English. Videos projected onto a screen behind her showed grass and city scenes, and when she cued a sample from Aretha Franklin’s “Day Dreaming,” the iconic singer’s image appeared onscreen. It’s a tough song to cover, but Ms. Charles’s band mostly got it (Revive’s other stage, at the Bowery Ballroom, hosted a less successful closing jam session on Saturday, full of special guests like Thundercat and Bilal but frustratingly orchestrated by the drummer Chris Dave, who could never seem to get satisfied with his sound team or his band.)

Vocalists at the edges of jazz, R&B and spoken word were a recurring theme throughout both weekends. At the Half Marathon, this year’s artist in residence, Meshell Ndegeocello — who performed in different configurations throughout the festival — presented a program titled “No More Water, the Fire Next Time,” with a midsize band holding down slow grooves, and the poet Staceyann Chin reading acid verses. Quoting James Baldwin and telling of her own childhood in Brooklyn, she sped past outrage and sorrow, getting straight to a sense of conviction.

During the Saturday of the full marathon, the singer Georgia Anne Muldrow joined the drummer Justin Brown’s band, Nyeusi. She delivered lines of homely inspiration, sometimes in a casual repartee, elsewhere in a wail. “All this colonization in your brain, you gotta empty it out for the real thing to come in,” she said. Behind her, Nyeusi ditched the wavy, synth-driven sound of its 2018 album, embracing something crunchier, more savory.

Some of the full weekend’s purest energy was on display at the SoHo Playhouse, a rustic little theater on Vandam Street. There the booking outfit Search and Restore — which has been involved in the festival for about a decade — secured a constant flow of boldly inventive musicians across two nights. Many of them, like the bass clarinetist Lea Bertucci and the trumpeter Steph Richards, were horn players testing the limits of their instruments — and their listeners. In duo with the drummer Gerald Cleaver on Friday night, the tenor saxophonist Travis Laplante used circular breathing to play repetitive, slowly morphing patterns that were both startling and hypnotic. Your ear echoed differently with every note, so that you ended up experiencing each cluster as a prism of many resonances, more than as a melody or a rhythm.

What’s new in jazz doesn’t always equate to youth, or even any clear stylistic break. At Subculture on Saturday, the tenor saxophonist J.D. Allen, 46, working with a still-new trio, welcomed David Murray, a stalwart saxophonist one generation Mr. Allen’s senior. As they played Mr. Allen’s stern but flexible original tunes, there was a vast difference in their approaches, but they traded ideas easily. The younger player often worked in long and heavy tones, related to John Coltrane; even his quickest lines had a wary darkness. Mr. Murray used a higher center of gravity, often vaulting from cool swing to fish-at-the-end-of-the-line agitation. On the punchy “Graffiti,” Murray chewed on his horn, softening the rhythm, and Nic Caccioppo’s drums ended up in an open tumble.

During the second weekend, Nublu’s stage was given over to International Anthem, a four-year-old independent label in Chicago that is already having an outsize influence on creative music. On Friday at 11:30, I knew I should be seeing what all the fuss was about with Louis Cole, a wunderkind YouTube sensation whose jazz-infused, fratty IDM is starting to give Snarky Puppy a run for its money. He was playing at the Sheen Center, a theater across from Subculture. Instead, I stood in the front row for all of Ben LaMar Gay’s riveting set — a tangle of samba, blues and math-rock, bouncing from Bubber Miley to Animal Collective — and then stuck around for Joshua Abrams and Natural Information Society, a sextet featuring the bandleader on guimbri, Lisa Alvarado pulling chords out of a sighing harmonium, and Jason Stein playing sharply cut patterns on the bass clarinet. Mr. Stein’s funny shapes jutted up against the group’s circular, silt-over-rock flow, creating good tension.

Mr. Abrams has been making Afrocentric, droning free jazz like this for a long time. In recent years, that kind of thing has become more commonplace on the avant-garde. Still, even if it didn’t reveal any blazing new truths, Mr. Abrams makes affecting music; I was glad to have stayed put and taken it in.