Overflow and bustle and ducking in and out of different rooms (if you can get in at all) is the point of this festival, now in its 12th year. It began as an add-on to the events surrounding the Association of Performing Arts Presenters conference, and has grown into a ritual of considerable importance. Around 7,000 people attended across Friday and Saturday, traversing nearly two miles of downtown Manhattan, and every sixth person seemed to be carrying an instrument case.

Put all that chaos against the fact that jazz is predicated on detail and long-exposure hearings, and you have a paradox. This year’s edition resolved the paradox a little bit.

It was among the best I’ve seen, partly because the Tishman Auditorium — and ECM Records, which used the space as a showcase — altered the experience, and partly because some bands and projects, there and elsewhere, played so well that moving on after a five-minute check-in was not an option. One was Mr. Virelles’s original, imposing band Mboko, with Matt Brewer on bass, Eric McPherson on drums, the conguero Román Díaz, and a guest, Frank Oropesa from the Cuban group Septeto Nacional Ignaçio Piñeiro, who was in town for a different concert. Mr. Oropesa played hand drums and recited flowing, lengthy narratives in the language of the Afro-Cuban Abakuá brotherhood. His words, and every other element of the music, functioned both as rhythm and melody, and Mr. Virelles extracted deep Ellingtonian colors out of the piano, using the full range of the keyboard with depth and precision.

Some sets were expandable, some were boiled down. The trumpeter Keyon Harrold, at SubCulture on Friday, played songs in hard, midtempo grooves, joyous or plaintive, with a loose quintet; the saxophonist J. D. Allen joined after a while, and the situation could have absorbed others. (One of the songs was “MB Lament,” dedicated to Michael Brown; Mr. Harrold comes from Ferguson, Mo.) The alto saxophonist Matana Roberts, in the same club at the beginning of that night, took the bravest route: an improvised solo performance. But she expanded it by regularly interrupting her own searching, bluesy flow and speaking into the microphone. She told a story about being in Memphis and stumbling across the Lorraine Motel, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and then talked about how music, for her, is inseparable from history.

Another high point came from a trio led by the drummer Jim Black, in a different part of the New School — an upstairs performance room in its jazz division. Mr. Black was a mainstay of the New York scene in the 1990s, but these days plays mostly in Europe; he’s associated with excitably scratchy bands involving electric instruments and a rockish vocabulary, but this group, with the pianist Teddy Klausner and the bassist Thomas Morgan, is one of the better new extensions of jazz’s long piano-trio tradition.