The Winter Jazzfest Acts Onstage and on the Market

Mr. Bernstein was onstage at Kennys Castaways with Sex Mob, his rambunctious small band, and he was in fact being serious. (He also leads Baby Loves Jazz, which has won awards from parent councils.) His pitch was aimed, with stagy transparency, at those audience members who were in town for the yearly conference of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters and spending their evening in shop-around mode.

The Winter Jazzfest was established with that purpose in mind conferencegoers attend free which helps explain why so many musicians agree to its amiable grind each year. Its a chance to appeal directly to the festival and concert bookers whose favor can result in a meal ticket, or merely a lifeline. The suboptimal performing conditions abbreviated sets, iffy sound, crowd chatter are a simple trade-off, part of the cost of transaction.

For its appreciative patrons, including the ticket-buying kind, the Winter Jazzfest offers something simpler and less pressured. Its a gluttonous feast: just under two dozen acts appeared in this years edition, which started at 6 p.m. and sprawled past 4 in the morning. The music was often strong; the vibe was brisk and social. Tickets were a bargain, at $25. (A special midnight showcase warranted a separate ticket.)

And the big experiment, a location change, posed no problems. In previous years the Winter Jazzfest was held in TriBeCa at the Knitting Factory, a three-level space that recently shut its doors. The closing prompted a move to three smaller Greenwich Village clubs: Le Poisson Rouge; Kennys Castaways, across the street; and Sullivan Hall, around the corner. Even in the snow (and later rain), moving among them was easy enough.

Still, ducking from club to club requires more investment than dashing from floor to floor, and so it was tougher than usual to get a full grasp of the lineup. Anyone staking out space for the midnight showcase, at Le Poisson Rouge, was likely to miss the Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey and the pianist Robert Glasper, both worthwhile attractions.

The sacrifice was worth it in that case: midnight belonged to the Watts Project, led by the intensely locomotive drummer Jeff (Tain) Watts and featuring Branford Marsalis on tenor and soprano saxophones, Terence Blanchard on trumpet and Christian McBride on bass. Drawing from Watts, which Mr. Watts will release on his own label next month, the band dropped a bruising and intermittently brilliant set, with each member throwing himself feet first into the roil.

This wasnt exactly a working band, as were most others in the festival. But the history within the group ran deep, especially between Mr. Watts and Mr. Marsalis, who had been billed as Prometheus Jenkins (fooling no one, it seems). On a breakneck original called Dancin 4 Chicken, Mr. Marsalis varied the flow of his solo with casual exactitude, and each nuance registered with the rhythm section as it plunged ahead.

A similarly responsive energy distinguished sets by the excellent Ivey-Divey Trio, with Don Byron on clarinet and tenor, Jason Moran on piano and Billy Hart on drums; and Tarbaby, a promising new project of the pianist Orrin Evans. Both groups played loose with form and tempo but without relinquishing any footing in the material. The same was almost true of Positive Catastrophe, an experimental big band led by the cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum, which delivered a joyous and defiantly raggedy performance.