The NYC Winter Jazzfest Marathon presented over 100 sets at 11 locations across two nights last weekend. I saw more than two dozen of those. That sounds like a small fraction, but I probably should have done less.

Now in its 14th year, the festival is a broad and generous sampler of jazz’s new specialty dishes: Everyone from oft-neglected elders to rising voices gets their due. Typically, if you only hear a fragment of every set, that’s O.K. You’re just there to get a taste.

But this year was different, for a few reasons. Somehow, despite the expanding attendance (nearly 9,000 visitors across two nights), there were rarely any lines outside a show. And once you were inside, the listening experiences were better; crowds appeared less put-upon and more engaged. This was the first year that it seemed like a good idea to stay where you were for a long period of time — or, at most, walk to one of the venues within a close distance.

There were trade-offs: The festival these days has an outsize footprint, extending all the way from the Bowery Ballroom on the Lower East Side to the New School on 13th Street, nearly a half-hour away on foot. At some point, you were likely to throw up your hands and accept that you were just going to miss that act you thought you had to see. But these are good problems.