NEW YORK, NY.- In 2005 — when the first NYC Winter Jazzfest was held at the Knitting Factory in lower Manhattan, and Jazz at Lincoln Center’s multimillion-dollar facilities had recently opened on the Upper West Side — it was clear which represented the establishment, and which was proposing an alternative. Today, it’s not such an easy distinction.

Steered by its artistic director, Pulitzer Prize-winning trumpeter and retro jazz philosopher Wynton Marsalis, Jazz at Lincoln Center was cultivating an older and affluent audience, adjacent to the opera-going crowd. Marsalis’ bookings proudly held the line for what he considered jazz’s defining virtues. Two decades later, those things are still true.

Winter Jazzfest was geared toward disruption. The mid-2000s were lean years for the music: Online file sharing hit jazz musicians especially hard, and the fallout from 9/11 left many live-music venues closed throughout New York City.

Brice Rosenbloom, Winter Jazzfest’s founder, positioned it as both an infusion of crucial life support and a challenge to some of jazz’s passively dominant trends. The festival’s biggest target, perhaps, was the idea that you could draw any stark dividing lines through music: Pop-friendly, fusion-driven, acoustic and tradition-revering improvisers coexisted on the festival’s bill, which in that first year unfolded across three stages on a single night at the Knit.

New York jazz lost its flagship summertime festival in 2009, leaving Winter Jazzfest as the biggest game in town; since then, it has grown into more than a week of concerts and satellite events. Every year, it offers a full buffet of the current flavors in jazz at a mix of theaters, rock halls and small rooms.

The 20th annual Winter Jazzfest marathons took place over the weekend, in lower Manhattan on Friday night and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on Saturday. From the sound of things, no matter how dark things may look in the wider world, the state of improvised music appears strong.

So strong, in fact, that Winter Jazzfest now has competition, of a sort. Jazz at Lincoln Center this past weekend inaugurated its own two-night marathon, the ambitiously titled Unity Jazz Festival, with 16 sets on three stages at the Columbus Circle facility. The bookings were more diverse than what Marsalis usually allows on his main stages (they were much closer to the variety at Dizzy’s Club, the smallest and most informal room at Jazz at Lincoln Center). The festival suggested a concerted effort by the center to participate in a conversation that it often keeps outside its walls.

There are extenuating reasons Jazz at Lincoln Center may have picked this weekend to mount its own festival: Namely, the Association of Performing Arts Presenters’ annual conference is held in mid-January, bringing industry professionals and performers to New York. It’s part of what made Rosenbloom pick these dates in the first place.

But the decision to place another festival right on top of Winter Jazzfest, with a similarly diversified booking strategy, couldn’t help but highlight how much has been flipped upside-down in jazz over the past 20 years. A once-insurgent festival is now so established, and its stylistic dictum so enthusiastically accepted, that even the most institutional presenter in jazz is emulating it.

I spent the weekend bouncing between Winter Jazzfest and Unity, and found that on the Winter Jazzfest front, the marathons are working as well as they have in years. The festival had been victim to its own success recently, spreading itself too thin across lower Manhattan and giving most listeners a logistical headache. Now, it has scaled back, focusing on guaranteeing high-quality listening experiences in fewer venues.

Virtuoso alto saxophonist Steve Lehman held a big crowd in thrall at the Superior Ingredients Rooftop in Williamsburg (insulated, luckily) as he played a set celebrating Anthony Braxton, issuing unbroken, topographically even eighth notes over an urgent undercurrent driven by Matt Brewer on bass and Damion Reid on drums. It was one of those heartening Winter Jazzfest moments, when you find yourself surrounded by hundreds of under-40 ears, at a venue unused to jazz, cheering loudly for improvisers.

Other highlights came from Roy Nathanson and the Jazz Passengers, honoring their recently departed trombonist, Curtis Fowlkes, at the Bowery Ballroom, and the slow, murky immersions of Tyshawn Sorey’s trio (Aaron Diehl on piano and Harish Raghavan on bass), making uncanny creative use of jazz’s classic repertoire at Le Poisson Rouge.

Just before they took the stage, Samora Pinderhughes had just finished up a spellbinding set, accompanied by a small choir. Later that evening, the same stage hosted an uneven but ultimately unforgettable performance of Pharoah Sanders’ “Harvest Time,” by an all-star band that included guitarist Tisziji Muñoz.

This year’s Winter Jazzfest began Wednesday, with a performance by Sorey at Public Records in Brooklyn, revisiting Max Roach’s epochal LP “Members, Don’t Git Weary.” The festival continues through this Thursday, when virtuoso bassist and meme-making prankster Mononeon convenes a group of musicians (and comedian Hannibal Buress) at Brooklyn Steel.

Throughout the week, Nublu in Alphabet City has been hosting nightly satellite shows, too. This is a festival that continues to ask what it means to present a music festival — particularly one that aspires to represent an entire, protean genre. And, especially at the marathons, it continues to yield opportunities to be surprised, to test your expectations of buzzy new bands, and even to be usefully let down by artists you considered great.

Speaking of surprises, my biggest of the weekend was Zacchae’us Paul, a pianist and vocalist increasingly known for his work alongside Melanie Charles, and who may soon break out on his own. Backed by a five-piece band, he danced in and out of funk, jazz-rock fusion and a kind of futuristic gospel. His trumpeter, Milena Casado, was a revelation. Then, when Baltimore-based young trumpeter Brandon Woody sat in, things kicked up two notches further. On the last song in the set, Woody and Casado traded lines, bringing the old idea of a cutting competition forward, riding a rising tide rather than a tete-a-tete.

The biggest affirmation of greatness came not from a jazz musician, but from a poet: Saul Williams, onstage at Nublu late Friday, backed only by an electronic musician. “What do we know of history / when all it does is repeat?” he asked the audience. “But we’re not here to repeat / we’re here to break cycles.” There was a roar of hopeful assent from a crowd hungry for a message that could meet this political moment.

If Winter Jazzfest offers an organic read on the many incipient forces driving the music forward, Unity Fest presented more like a cut-and-dried sampler of the known subgenres that nowadays fall under the label of “jazz.”

Representing Latin jazz was Sonido Solar, a youthful ensemble that has been mentored by Eddie Palmieri, and which played an arrangement of his tune “Puerto Rico” in an earnest, salsa-dura style. There was historically rooted free jazz, courtesy of downtown doyen William Parker and his ensemble, In Order to Survive. There was avant-garde jazz in the mode of mid-1960s John Coltrane, courtesy of Scatter the Atoms That Remain and a front line of all-star guests (trumpeter Randy Brecker and saxophonists Billy Harper and Isaiah Collier).

And representing the present-day sound of contemporary, improvised music was Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah, a New Orleans-born trumpeter with a musical philosophy basically opposed to Marsalis’ conservatism. He brought an ensemble to the elegant Appel Room theater, overlaying syncopated backbeats, heralding horn lines and tapestries of Rhodes and distorted guitar.

There were also plenty of younger musicians in a mode more typical of Jazz at Lincoln Center: pianist Isaiah Thompson’s quartet, drawing upon a hard-bop sound that was especially popular in the middle of the country in the mid-20th century; trumpeter Alphonso Horne, playing feel-good jazz by way of New Orleans; and bassist Endea Owens, strutting through a version of the blues brought up to date.

Unlike Winter Jazzfest, which rewards a quick musical metabolism and demands sprinting around in the cold, Unity Fest provided an enjoyable environment for older audience members, as well as some disabled listeners. The lush facilities can’t compete on the level of energy with a downtown music marathon, but they had their creature comforts. The shows allowed contemporary jazz to feel both alive and manageable.

Ideally, Unity Fest amounts to a promise of more open roads ahead. The festival was dedicated to Funmi Ononaiye, a Jazz at Lincoln Center programmer, longtime DJ, percussionist and beloved music advocate who blanketed the New York scene. He played a big role in planning Unity Fest, even as he battled illness; his death last month at 55 left New York’s jazz scene bereaved. Ononaiye was known to have a talent for making all listeners feel welcome at the shows he presented. If this festival pushes Jazz at Lincoln Center’s future programming in that direction, his legacy is secure.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.