Carrie Smith sang “Backwater Blues” at Thursday night’s “Highlights in Jazz” concert, and it was one of the most moving performances I’ve ever heard. Perhaps the last of the great 1920s-style “classic” blues divas, Ms. Smith had sung the same song last July at the 92nd Street Y, and then was still her usual robust, full-figured, and full-voiced self. But she has not been well these last six months, she looked frail the other night, and had to be assisted out on stage.

Ms. Smith made “Backwater Blues” seem more devastating than ever, and it was hard not to think of recent events as she sang “When the wind begins to blow / There’s thousands of people that ain’t got no place to go” and “I looked down on the house where I used to live … / My house fell down and I can’t live there no more.” The number was the climax of an outstanding concert of pre-modern jazz.

It opened with a new band, the Manhattan Ragtime Orchestra, which currently plays Thursday nights at the Cajun and Sunday Brunches at Iridium. Led by Swedish clarinetist Orange Kellin, the eight-piece ensemble (four frontline, including violin, and four rhythm) plays what Mr. Kellin describes as “radical pop music from the ragtime era.”

As heard on their debut album, “Euphonic Sounds” (Stomp Off CD1402), this means jazz roots music – the cutting-edge sounds of the generation before the jazz age, a mixture of ragtime, blues, marches, waltzes, and some sounds suggestive of New Orleans polyphony. This is really archaic stuff, but the Ragtimers play it with incessant verve and irresistible drive. It might as well be swing.

Following the Manhattan Ragtimers and a very funny duo of the Fats Waller-ian guitarist-singer Marty Grosz and clarinetist Ken Peplowksi, an all-star sextet played a set in the Jazz at the Philharmonic format. By that I mean they played one number as collective (a very modern, Latin treatment of “St. Louis Blues”), then a series of five features for each player, and lastly a rousing ensemble piece (“I Found a New Baby,” featuring drummer Rodney Green).

The leader and emcee was the fine traditional trombonist Wycliffe Gordon, who showed a new side of his talent, as a Jay Leonhart-like songwriter and vocalist, on a sincere ode entitled “Toast My Bread” (apparently not a double-entendre). Trumpeter Randy Sandke repeatedly ascended high registers in a Dizzy-like manner on an Armstrong tune, “Thanks a Million.”

Mr. Peplowski exhumed one of the earliest jazz standards, “That Da-Da Strain,” which he played with a beguine-like lilt. Ebullient bassist Nicki Parrot rendered the melody to “Sentimental Journey” as a bouncy solo. And 19-year-old keyboard virtuoso Aaron Diehl, who arrived in New York last September to study at Juilliard and is already making a name for himself, revisited Art Tatum’s famous treatment on Massanet’s “Elegy.”

The concert was advertised as “an evening of traditional jazz.” Fortunately for all concerned, showmanship and fun are a big part of that tradition.