Nancy Wilson in concert is always a special experience. The veteran vocalist can easily fill Carnegie Hall with adoring fans who have been listening to her for 40 years or more, who cheer her every move, and who shower her with standing ovations after every other song. And with good reason: With her idiosyncratic mixture of soul, blues, jazz, and traditional standards, Ms. Wilson is, like the late Nina Simone, a role model for several generations of contemporary female singers.

Following her most recent New York performance, at Lincoln Center in 2003, Ms. Wilson announced she was planning to retire. It seemed like a typically dramatic statement calculated to earn audience sympathy — the crowd groaned and protested. These days, though Ms. Wilson hasn’t quit singing altogether, she has cut way back on her touring schedule, even after being named an NEA Jazz Master in 2006. On Saturday night, the JVC Jazz Festival coaxed her back to the stage by honoring her with “Nancy Wilson’s Swingin’ 70th Birthday Party” at Carnegie.

The concert was structured both like a testimonial evening and a variety show (early on, Ms. Wilson briefly dropped a reference to “The Nancy Wilson Show,” her Emmy-winning TV variety series of the 1960s), and began with Ms. Wilson’s trio — Llew Matthews on piano, Rufus Reid on bass, Roy McCurdy on drums. During the course of two-and-a-half hours, she also introduced three guest singers and four-star instrumentalists, all but one of whom (the violinist Regina Carter) were pianists with whom she sang.

Of the first three guests, two made the point that it’s not only female singers who have learned from Ms. Wilson. Regina Carter, showing her usual cagey skill at goosing a crowd, played Duke Ellington’s “Imagine My Frustration,” starting with a plain vanilla tone for the melody before livening it up with a bluesy pizzicato section and soulful vocal inflections.

The second singer, Nnenna Freelon, opened “They Can’t Take That Away From Me” with protracted, cantorial moaning. Then she strutted to “If I Had You” with what seemed like Balinese dance moves.

Finally, the Chicago-based singer Kurt Elling was neither in peak voice nor doing his usual way-out material, but what he did do was thoughtful and nearly brilliant. Singing two Nancy Wilson songs, “Sunny” (in a fast 3/4 time) and “Save Your Love for Me,” he reprised not only her vintage arrangements but, in the second especially, her soul shtick, jumping from high falsetto notes to basement pedal tones in a way that was almost comic.

The first of the star pianists was the biggest: Herbie Hancock (wearing the dapper, all-black affair he had on two nights before at Ron Carter’s 70th) gave an effusive speech about Ms. Wilson before settling into an ingeniously reharmonized (as he told us) and swinging trio treatment of Cole Porter’s “I Love You.” Ms. Wilson then joined him for a duet on Willard Robison’s “Old Folks” — one chorus, with a quiet solo spot for Mr. Hancock in the middle — a very intricate and idiosyncratic song that was perfect for the occasion.

Now working with Mr. Matthews and the trio, Ms. Wilson swung out with VanMorrison’s “Moondance” over a “Milestones”-style 6/8 vamp (a riff that arrangers have used and reused for the last 50 years); Ms. Wilson sang it so musically that it was difficult to notice the song’s substandard melodic bridge. After a dedication to her longtime manager, John Levy, she was joined onstage by her former accompanist, Michael Wolf, who played on a highly soulful “Teach Me Tonight.” This was one of several occasions when Ms. Wilson pulled out all the stops, and her signature mannerisms became a little overthe-top — particularly those extended high-note, slightly off-key wails that she learned from Jimmy Scott (who should have been present). She concluded by repeating and shouting the two words “teach me” with erotic overtones.

In the second half of the show, the pianist Ramsey Lewis essayed a contemplatively classical solo reading of John Coltrane’s “Dear Lord,” almost as if he wanted to atone for the acres of proto-smooth jazz he has recorded through the years. Staying with the religious motif, Ms. Wilson joined Mr. Lewis on “God Bless the Child,” which started small but was again rather exaggerated by the time it was finished.

Dianne Reeves then came out and not only gave the most moving testimonial to her friendship with Ms. Wilson, but provided what was nearly the musical high point of the evening: Singing two numbers she learned from vintage Nancy Wilson LPs — “Over the Weekend” and “Midnight Sun” — she rhapsodized over composer Sonny Burke’s long, chromatic melody lines. The one disappointment of her turn on stage was that her duet with Ms. Wilson wasn’t as thrilling as it should have been; the two bit off a tricky arrangement on “Happy Talk” without really learning it.

Ms. Wilson’s final segment, which began with the fast jazz waltz, “Never Will I Marry,” was her finest. Even when she switched gears to a cheesy tune, “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” with cheesy electric keyboard accompaniment, she still sounded great — she couldn’t make me love the song but I certainly love her. Her “Day In, Day Out” moved breathlessly fast and covered a lot of ground, with feet patting and fingers snapping all the way up to the highest balcony. “Guess Who I Saw Today?” (which Eartha Kitt sang on the same stage at her 80th birthday party on Monday) found Ms. Wilson exaggerating her familiar mannerisms once again, stretching consonants and working in Gospel-style mellismas and other embellishments; it was a bit much for me, but the crowd went crazy, giving her the biggest GASO (the late critic Stanley Dance’s term for “Great American Standing Ovation”) of the evening.

The evening’s final number, “How Long Has This Been Going On?” was a paradox: The arrangement was spoiled by the use of a tinny-sounding synthesizer keyboard, but Ms. Wilson was in peak form, singing the words and melody with authority and sincerity, and without any overdecoration.

At the end of the night, as she brought everyone back onstage for a bow, Ms. Wilson again announced that she is still planning to retire. Once again, the news brought a huge groan of protest from the crowd, but as with anything that Nancy Wilson says, I believe it.

wfriedwald@nysun.com