The Harlem Renaissance began in 1919, with what was ostensibly the first African-American pride parade, when the all-black 369th U.S. Infantry marched up Fifth Avenue. Throughout the 1920s, Harlem played host to a flowering of music, visual arts, poetry, drama, and literature.

“At Harlem’s Height,” mounted by the New York Festival of Song and the Lincoln Center American Songbook series at Rose Hall on Wednesday night, was a thoroughly satisfying revue celebrating the songs of the period. While the show contained very effective readings from poetry and autobiography, the emphasis was on theater and concert music of the period. Contralto Dana Hancard, bass-baritone James Martin, and tenor-baritone Darius De Haas were accompanied by Mr. Blier and Michael Barrett, pianos. The decision to present the program without amplification meant they had to strain some to be heard, but all came through fine in Rose Hall’s wonderful acoustics.

Even the shows failings were instructive. The presentation began and ended with up-tempo numbers, which fell flat as none of the performers or accompanists were able to swing. In general, the further they kept from jazz and the closer they stayed to formal music, the better the show was. This was actually true to the period: Most black performers in the early 1920s were hardly true jazz or blues singers; like most Northern, urban blacks, they had grown up on operetta and vaudeville.

The program took some detours through later, post-Renaissance songs by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, mainly because Mr. De Haas sings them so well. But for the most part it concentrated on Andy Razaf, the great African-American lyric poet, with readings that positioned Razaf as a peer of Paul Lawrence Dunbar and Langston Hughes.

Ms. Hanchard’s sang in the semi-formal style of Adelaide Hall, and her big moment was a concert setting of the traditional spiritual “A City Called Heaven.” De Haas was most effective on the Ellington and Strayhorn material (particularly the reverential “In a Sentimental Mood”), and also got a big hand with Razaf’s racy “I’m Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town,” although that 1941 blues went on too long.

Mr. Martin, evoking such great African-American concert singers as Paul Robeson and William Warfield, scored heavily on Dunbar’s “Li’l Gal” and on one of W. C. Handy’s more offbeat pieces, “Harlem Blues.” He also surprised us with a song-and-dance turn and Jolson-style posturing on Luckey Roberts’s ragtime tongue twister “Mo’ Lasses.”

Apart from the flat swing numbers, the only disappointment was the decision to present Razaf and Fats Waller’s “Black and Blue” by a male singer and without its revelatory verse. This seemed like an attempt to make it a civil-rights song rather than a protest against prejudice within the black community as well as the larger white world. The producers should have trusted that Razaf knew what he was doing when he wrote it.

The Harlem Renaissance unfortunately faded with the onset of the Great Depression, but Mr. Blier showed us convincingly how its achievements live on.

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Last Friday, when “Paul Whiteman and the Jazz Age”) let out in the Rose Theater, I dashed across the hall to try to get into Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola to hear Carol Sloane. No dice. The place was packed. This Tuesday I returned to Dizzy’s – with a reservation this time – and got to hear another veteran performer, who has an almost frighteningly intimate way with a great jazz standard.

Guitarist Jim Hall has a new album out, “Magic Meeting” (Artist-Share002), which was recorded live a year ago at the Village Vanguard. The trio on the CD is first-rate, with bassist Scott Colley and one of the most imposing of all bop drummers, Lewis Nash. The group backing him at Dizzy’s includes the Steve LaSpina (bass) and Kenny Wolleson (drums), as well as a very sympathetic foil in the person of Greg Osby (alto sax).

To most jazz fans, Mr. Hall is best known for his extended encounters with two major colossi of modern jazz, Bill Evans (with whom he made two classic albums) and Sonny Rollins (with whom he toured in a regularly-working quartet). In the pantheon of jazz guitarists, Mr. Hall is a transitional figure: His playing reflects both the old-world chordal splendor of Tal Farlow and Bucky Pizzarelli and the electronic vistas and experimentation of post-modernists like Bill Frisell.

Mr. Hall often uses that most fundamental of jazz forms, the blues, to launch into some of his furthest-out playing, as he does on “Bent Blue.” The title is both a reference to a “bent” blues and a dedication to Ben Blue, a slapstick comic popular in Mr. Hall’s youth (he turns 75 in December). The melody is reminiscent of Monk’s “Epistrophy,” and at Dizzy’s Mr. Hall structured his solo not only in terms of different melodic fragments but as a series of constantly changing sonic textures.

Mr. Hall’s interplay with Mr. Osby at Dizzy’s makes this an essential gig. As pianistic as Mr. Hall sometimes gets, he is rarely content to assume the traditional keyboard role in the quartet. He almost never “accompanies” the other players; he’s much more likely to zing something at them that they have to respond to. And even though there are long solos in the Hall Quartet, you’re rarely conscious of one player stopping and another starting. The individual solos weave in and out of one another in a seamless fashion.

Mr. Hall’s greatest strength is the old-school fashion in which he renders standards. He played the most beautiful rendition of “Skylark” imaginable -showing that for all his technical know-how, his playing is still primarily driven by warm emotion. His chordal choices are so right and so perfect – he does what only a handful of the greatest jazz pianists, such as Evans, have done.

Jim Hall until February 27 (Broadway at 60th Street, 212-258-9595).