When the Cabaret Convention, whose 17th season concludes tonight at Jazz at Lincoln Center, was new, it was a very different animal. In the early years, it was a much more democratic affair, and not in a good way: All the big stars of the cabaret world were there, but so too, it seemed, were every Tom, Dick, and Harriet singing at Danny’s or Don’t Tell Mama. A typical evening was interminably long and at least half the performers were people I never wanted to see again.

Over the years, the Cabaret Convention, as presented by the Mabel Mercer Foundation, has evolved into something less like an opencall audition and more like a real concert series. Many nights even have themes, which are frequently the songbooks of the major composers.

This year, the series began on Monday with “Say It With Music,” saluting Irving Berlin, and will conclude tonight with “The Glory of the Gershwins.” (And for those who can’t get enough of cabaret in a concert setting, Town Hall, the home of the Convention for its first 15 years, is mounting its own three-night “Broadway Cabaret Festival,” beginning tonight with “Music in the Air: A Tribute to Jerome Kern.”)

The Irving Berlin show consisted almost entirely of headliners, with a special emphasis on pianists and Klea Blackhurst, who bookended the show and also had her own spot in the middle. One of Ms. Blackhurst’s standard spiels is that she is “genetically predisposed” to perform music associated with Ethel Merman. Because of the Merman-Berlin connection — the star and the songwriter enjoyed two of their biggest hit shows together,”Annie Get Your Gun” and “Call Me Madam” — Ms. Blackhurst did most of her numbers in the belting Merman style.

This projectile approach, as on “Doin’ What Comes Natur’lly” — Berlin’s paean to illiteracy — is highly exciting, but Ms. Blackhurst should also have been given the opportunity to show how she can reach an audience with a softer, more intimate style.

Otherwise, the evening pivoted around three star keyboardists: Bill Charlap, Steve Ross, and Barbara Carroll. Mr. Charlap began with “Easter Parade,” a song rarely jazzed, in which he essayed an improvisation that sounded like it could have been one of Berlin’s own contrapuntal lines (as on “You’re Just in Love”). Ms. Carroll began with a treatment of “Be Careful It’s My Heart” that contrasted opulent (though never overdone) chords with a simple, talksinging style. She then went for baroque on a set of variations on “Blue Skies” that combined Bach with Bud Powell while bassist Jay Leonhart quoted Oscar Pettiford.

The ever-delightful Mr. Ross, winner of this year’s Mabel Award (for service to the cabaret community), performed an Astaire-centric segment with “I Love a Piano,” which referenced the second Mozart piano concerto, and did a dance medley that wittily juxtaposed “Cheek to Cheek” with the vamp from Kern’s “I Won’t Dance.”

Of the non-pianists, Lumiri Tubo did a serviceably soulful job with Ethel Waters’s two big numbers from “Thousands Cheer”: “Harlem On My Mind” and “Suppertime.” K.T. Sullivan began on an odd note with a rather formal reading of one of Berlin’s bluesier songs, “Love, You Didn’t Do Right By Me.” But then, just as she did last week at the Lost Musicals production of “Fifty Million Frenchmen,” Ms. Sullivan brought down the house with Berlin’s risquéé “You’d Be Surprised,” incorporating two key changes and modulating from whisper to belt.

If Ms. Sullivan was the funniest performer of he evening, the most touching was Sandy Stewart, accompanied by her son, Mr. Charlap, who delivered a moving ballad version of “I Got the Sun in the Morning.” Normally done as an uptempo dance number, she sang it slowly and wondrously, as if she were seeing the sun for the very first time.

Ms. Stewart also delivered a touching “Always,” in a way that de-emphasized the waltz tempo. Ms. Blackhurst ended the evening by belting “There’s No Business Like Show Business” in a curiously funky odd-meter.

Extending a little more than two hours, it was the shortest Mabel Mercer Foundation event ever, and for the first time I can remember, the crowd actually left the Convention wanting more.

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When I interviewed the singer-songwriter Dave Frishberg last week for a feature in the Sun, he was keen to tell me how much he loved the music of the jazz composer George Handy, especially the song “Where You At.”

“That’s a very musical song that he wrote,” Mr. Frishberg said. “I never heard anybody harmonize a melody quite that way before — it’s very simple, only a couple of chords to it, but Handy had a real original approach. It’s fun to play jazz choruses on it.”

To my surprise, not long after my conversation with Mr. Frishberg, I learned that the Manhattan School of Music was mounting a full-scale concert of Handy’s jazz compositions, which occurred Tuesday.

George Handy (1920–97) composed music in the idiom once known as “progressive jazz,” highly steeped in the harmonic vocabulary of 20th-century composers like Bartók and Stravinsky but also rooted in the swinging rhythms and instrumentation of big band jazz. He did his most famous work for the bandleader Boyd Raeburn in the mid-1940s, but also wrote and produced albums under his own name and for the great tenor saxophonist, Zoot Sims.

Tuesday’s concert by the Manhattan School of Music Concert Jazz Band, conducted by Justin Di Cioccio, included Handy’s best-known individual works — “Dalvatore Sally” and “The Bloos” — as well as 10 pieces from his 1955 album “By George (Handy, of Course)” which add up to a suite.

“The Bloos,” recorded in 1946 but never before played live, employs an augmented big band with the addition of classical strings and winds, while the 1955 pieces use a diminished 10-piece group, including violin and oboe. “The Bloos” sounded like the intermediate step between Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” and Bernstein’s later “Symphonic Dances,” combining the blues with Darius Milhaud.

“Dalvatore Sally,” the most celebrated of Handy’s works for the Raeburn band, is more like dance music, a surreal spin on the standard swing band flagwaver — for that reason it suffered when the orchestra played it significantly slower than on the 1945 recording.

The “By George” pieces are magnificent miniatures, essentially “through-composed,” as host and narrator Ben Bierman noted, as opposed to using the standard cycle-of-choruses format. The 10 short pieces exist in their own musical space, sounding somewhat like Handy’s earlier work, but also like contemporary jazz ensembles.

More than the 1940s pieces, the “By George” works cry out to be choreographed, but whether or not that ever happens, this is music that deserves to be heard again in concert.

wfriedwald@nysun.com