Long ago, the JVC Jazz Festival started programming its concerts by formula. Perhaps for that reason, Wednesday night’s show at Carnegie Hall, built around the bassist Ron Carter, felt familiar. It was a quadruple-decker, with some of Mr. Carter’s old friends of high repute, as well as his two current bands, and the straw occasion for it was his 70th birthday last month.
Though he’s better known as a sideman than as a bandleader, Ron Carter is important to jazz; at this point he can be given full-dress reconsideration without any excuse. It’s just that this festival is birthday-crazy. The familiar feeling could have been a result of Lee Konitz’s 80th-birthday show two days before, or an anticipation of Nancy Wilson’s 70th-birthday concert still to come. But there was also the memory of a Herbie Hancock JVC Festival concert from last year, which was set up similarly, running from duets to full-band performances, including some of the same musicians.
In Wednesday night’s show, the audience was treated to Ron Carter, Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock: three-fifths of the mid-’60s Miles Davis Quintet. Mr. Carter is the most stolid of the three, but whenever two or more of these musicians convene, their playing shines with a mischievous energy, a sense that they are creatively breaking rules to make themselves happy.
It didn’t quite take flight. With the drummer Billy Cobham making it a quartet, the group played Miles Davis’s “So What,” and Mr. Hancock’s exquisite accompanying figures — in every bar he seemed to be turning harmonies freshly upside down or inside out — were muffled by either the room’s acoustics or Mr. Cobham’s clattering figures. Too quickly, they turned into “Seven Steps to Heaven,” at too fast a tempo.
“Stella By Starlight,” a careful duet for piano and bass, put some clarity in the situation, but then “All Blues,” with the whole quartet, made it fuzzy again. The musicians put in some alterations — for four-bar stretches, they modulated up a whole step or double-timed the rhythm — but these nice little ideas grew stale in repetition, and even Mr. Shorter’s thoughtful solo brought no revelations.
One of Mr. Carter’s best recent bands is a drummerless trio with the pianist Mulgrew Miller and the guitarist Russell Malone, and that group played a bright set, constantly revolving itself to thrust a different player forward. Its arrangement of “The Golden Striker,” a simple and beautiful piece written by John Lewis for the Modern Jazz Quartet, left enough open space to allow Mr. Carter’s firm, rhythm-pushing notes, and his surprising harmonic choices, to really be heard.
Mr. Carter’s duets with the guitarist Jim Hall were bumpy but intermittently strong, especially on “Body and Soul,” where the imagination and economy of each musician’s accompaniment matched any of the soloing.
The final act was Mr. Carter’s current quartet, with Stephen Scott on piano, Payton Crossley on drums and Rolando Morales-Matos on percussion. It’s an adequate but low-key band, and at times the music felt frustratingly distant, lacking a basic urgency. But in the middle of “Joshua,” Mr. Carter broke out with an unaccompanied bass solo — “Willow Weep for Me,” another song entirely — and he transformed it, with slides and octave jumps and blues language.
At the end of each set, Mr. Carter handed each player a silk handkerchief as a thank-you, each one a different color. He gave the last one, bright red, to himself.
