Tuesday night’s tribute to Barbara Carroll at the Kaye Playhouse was the third event of this year’s JVC Jazz Festival dedicated to the musical legacy of a single individual. They arrived in order of age before beauty: a centennial salute for the late Doc Cheatham, a 90th-birthday party for Les Paul, and a tribute to Ms. Carroll who, 10 years younger than Mr. Paul, is the baby of the bunch. Few musicians of her generation remain as vital as Ms. Carroll.

The evening, produced and hosted by Ms. Carroll’s longtime bassist, Jay Leonhart, was rife with star power, including virtually all of the great lady’s still-active piano contemporaries. Marian McPartland, Dr. Billy Taylor, and Dick Hyman were there; so was impresario-pianist George Wein; so were several of Ms. Carroll’s pianist-singer disciples – Daryl Sherman, Billy Stritch, and Ann Hampton Callaway – as well as two younger non-singing pianist acolytes, Bill Charlap and Ted Rosenthal.

Despite all the major names, this evening wasn’t about stars trying to show off. In Ms. Carroll’s music, the interplay’s the thing, and the principal strength of the evening was the spontaneous way the participants played together. Often, these were the expected – but still wonderful – combinations. Mr. Charlap and Mr. Leonhart played the opening piano-bass duo, “The Lady Is a Tramp” (offered with a joyous sense of tongue-in-cheek). This was followed by a second piano-bass exchange, this time between Ms. Sherman and Mr. Tate, on Duke Ellington’s “Tulip or Turnip.” On a Brazilian-style treatment of “It Might as Well Be Spring,” Dr. Taylor traded phrases with the only horn player on the bill, Joe Wilder, here playing flugelhorn and enhancing the south-of-the-border mood with an irreverent quote from the “Mexican Hat Dance.”

Some of the interactions were entirely unpredictable, as when Ms. Callaway unexpectedly interviewed Jazz at Lincoln Center Chairman Lisa Schiff and turned her responses into a song, spontaneously crafting words and music. (I have seen her do this bit in smaller, clubs, but never in a concert setting.) Then, too, when Bucky Pizzarelli took the stage, Mr. Leonhart encouraged him to play “Nuages,” which he did on Sunday at Carnegie. In a very Basie-like “All of Me,” Messrs. Wein and Pizzarelli assumed the roles of Count Basie and Freddy Green, respectively.

There also were opportunities for two pianists to work together in fourhanded duets, which is rare except during festival season. Mr. Charlap and Mr. Rosenthal, both veterans of the Gerry Mulligan Quartet, got together on Mulligan’s lovely “Curtains.” Mr. Hyman and Dr. Taylor jointly essayed Ellington’s “Squeeze Me” (only they used the intro to “Things Ain’t What They Used To Be” instead of “Squeeze Me’s” famous vamp). Something I have almost never seen before is two singer-pianists doing both at once, as Mr. Stritch and Ms. Sherman did in a pair of early Cole Porter songs, “Why Shouldn’t I?” and “Let’s Misbehave.”

Yet no one played better or got a bigger hand than the great lady herself. She has been doing a lot of Harold Arlen (mostly on Sundays at the Algonquin) in his centennial year, and she started her first of several segments with “Last Night When We Were Young” – a telling tune to play on such an occasion. For “As Long as I Live,” she did the rare verse sitting at the keyboard and then stood up – also a rare event – to sing the chorus.

Ms. Carroll’s two-piano duet with Ms. McPartland, on a third Arlen tune, “This Time the Dream’s on Me,” illuminated the differences between these two grand divas of modern piano. Ms. McPartland concentrates on beautiful, luminescent chords, and gradually lets the melody go its own way. When Ms. Carroll plays a familiar classic song, it’s like looking at a beautiful woman in a swimming pool: You see the figure and you see the water around her, but the one never obscures the other. It’s a wonderful, translucent approach to bebop piano.

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Yet “A Four Score Salute to Barbara Carroll” was only one of many outstanding piano events at JVC. With the “Masters and Legends” concert last week and Cyrus Chestnut and John Hicks’s marvelous evening of four-handed duets on Monday, the Carroll tribute on Tuesday, and the Keith Jarrett Trio on Wednesday, JVC 2005 could have been billed as the Year of the Piano.

Certain aspects of a Keith Jarrett performance are entirely predictable. He does not announce tunes, or even name the other two members of his long-standing trio (Gary Peacock on bass and Jack De-Johnette on drums). He also ends the “official” part of the concert early enough so that the evening can build to a long series of standing ovations and encores – which, in effect, amount to a third set.

When Mr. Jarrett plays, he rises up from the keyboard in a series of astoundingly ungraceful contortions, leaning into the instrument like a downhill skier, twisting sideways as if he were trying to scratch his back with his nose, hunching forward as if someone had just punched him in the gut (which wouldn’t be entirely surprising). And one thing you always can count on is his inevitable opening tantrum.

In fact, a Keith Jarrett concert is inevitably described less like a musical performance than a boxing match. The first thing everybody wants to know is who got bashed. When Mr. Jarrett starts swinging, the term refers to verbal punches rather than what he does at the keyboard. This time he started by promising us he was not going to launch into his usual tirade – because he said, the re-election of President Bush made him feel “mellow” (meaning “complacent”).

Once we were primed to expect a round of Bush-bashing, though, he instead launched into his customary at tack on the New York Times. In September 2003, he beat them up for recommending his concert (don’t ask), and this time he savaged the paper because its review of his new solo album (“Radiance” ECM 1960/61) wasn’t long enough to suit him.

Mr. Jarrett, however, was swinging at the keyboard soon enough, especially on two fast numbers, a boppish barn-burner by Bud Powell and an upbeat original blues. He usually finds great and unusual tunes to play, but I couldn’t have anticipated he would chose both of Nashville songwriter Pee Wee King’s crossover blockbusters, “The Tennessee Waltz” and “You Belong to Me.” The latter was especially moving, though not in the usual way. It’s normally done as a song about travel (“see the pyramids along the Nile”); Mr. Jarrett, however, cut to its core as a song of romantic possession.

Another predictable thing about this Carnegie show was that the sound was particularly bad (a far cry from the crystal-clear piano shows at Rose Hall, Merkin Hall, and the Kaye Playhouse). During the fast numbers in the first set, Mr. DeJohnette’s drumming tended to overwhelm the keyboard. Perhaps to compensate, Mr. Jarrett called only slower numbers following the intermission.

His very rhythmic (but not superfast) “Green Dolphin Street” began with a long Pan-American vamp. Then he gave us two killer ballads associated with Sinatra, “Only the Lonely” and “Last Night When We Were Young.” Both were extremely touching and tender, and the second veered off briefly into “The Glory of Love,” then reprised the Latin-style vamp from “Green Dolphin” 20 minutes earlier.

The bad boy of jazz ended with three “encores,” as the sold-out crowd clambered to its feet over and over again: Leonard Bernstein’s “Somewhere,” Monk’s “Straight No Chaser,” and, from the Nat King Cole songbook, “When I Fall in Love.” Fortunately, his playing is as marvelous as the man himself is obnoxious. Keith Jarrett is the original sore winner.