Festival, Now 59, Welcomes Several Generations NEWPORT, R.I. - The Newport Jazz Festival, which ended Sunday at Fort Adams State Park here, is 59 now. It had early brilliance followed by middle-age aesthetic confusion, edging into pop and smooth jazz. Over the last nine years, it has corrected its course, entering a new period of steadiness and dignity as it seeks a new framing of jazz - and of its own audience. Newport serves its own interests - its history, its long relationships with particular musicians - and monitors the aesthetic horizon, careful not to make its bookings too obscure or too slick. There are more inventive, more specific and daring jazz festivals, and bigger ones. But Newport, with all the important recordings generated from its past and its career-making (or career-saving) performances, is genuinely tied up with the story of modern jazz. In the 1950s and some of the "60s, it was often the case that if you were a hero at Newport, you were a hero in jazz generally. That could be the case again. Recently the festival has navigated rough waters well. There is more to do. Careers in jazz are long now, but they can take several decades to develop, if developing means getting to the point where an audience at an outdoor festival will give you a standing ovation before you play a note. Some of those musicians - the major heroes of jazz, who attained peak relevance in the "60s or "70s - are entering their true late periods. Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Eddie Palmieri, Wayne Shorter and Roy Haynes, all of whom performed over the weekend, are all somewhere on the line between 72 and 88. And all of them performed at a high level. Mr. Shorter brought his regular quartet, sometimes augmented by Mr. Hancock, who played four-handed piano sitting on the bench next to Danilo Pérez through the group's intuitive, nebulous cohesion. Mr. Palmieri brought his orchestra, heaving out hard-core Afro-Cuban dance music and Latin jazz, spangled with dissonant piano chords. And Mr. Corea presented a new band, the Vigil, which finds a middle way between electric fusion and mainstream acoustic jazz; it involves the drummer Marcus Gilmore (Mr. Haynes's grandson), the bassist Christian McBride, the saxophonist Tim Garland and Charles Altura, who is perfect for this music, a young guitar hero who can play faster than you can think. And Mr. Haynes was himself; he swung aggressively, tap-danced, hit all available surfaces with his drumsticks and teased his audience. In none of these cases was there a sense of audiences delivering respect just because respect is deserved, a hazard of jazz festivals. Newport is also trying to replenish those heroes with middle-age ones, the major figures whom we might take for granted because they're so busy. The trumpeter Terence Blanchard and the saxophonist Steve Coleman fit that description on Saturday and Sunday. Mr. Blanchard's performance felt a bit more normative. His working band, including the pianist Fabian Almazan, the saxophonist Brice Winston and the guitarist Lionel Loueke, played new music that borrowed the patient spaciness and curiosity about sound of Miles Davis's "Bitches Brew" period. But Mr. Blanchard has a great understanding of pacing and drama, and in the liquid structure of his piece "Hallucinations," he played a solo that could get pretty much anyone interested in him: slow and ripping, with lots of space and variation, thematic, logically built, full of melody and weird texture. There was jazz history and process, but it was also thrilling on a basic level. Mr. Coleman's setup was more unusual. Now 56, he's less about a new group or a new album (though he has both of those pretty often) than a continuing lesson; the method of his music was what mattered more than lineups or material. He played three shorter sets: one a first-time performance of a new composed piece for the classical Talea Ensemble, joined by jazz improvisers including himself, the trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson and the drummer Dafnis Prieto. It used his overlapping rhythmic cycles on a more even grid and came out sounding like Henry Threadgill. Then a duet with the pianist David Bryant, and finally a loose and mesmerizing set of fast, polyrhythmic, polytonal music with his band Five Elements, which included Mr. Bryant, the electric bassist Anthony Tidd, Mr. Finlayson and Mr. Gilmore once again, right after his set with Mr. Corea. Mr. Coleman played at the festival two years ago and seems as if he could become a kind of a regular here; it would be great to see who else could come on his stage and join his system. The festival is also trying to seed the ground for the next group of heroes. It's going after the waves of young jazz-literate musicians banging around New England jazz schools, and it sold 1,900 reduced-price tickets to them this year, out of the 17,200 total attendance. There are plans to add a third full day to the festival next year of younger musicians only, which could be an important move but only if it doesn't seem like ghettoization. Newport Jazz wants to represent its interests - not just with the new guitar shredders, like Mr. Altura, but the newer scholars and tradition bridgers, like Amir ElSaffar, the trumpeter and bandleader who brought his group Two Rivers, incorporating Iraqi music and jazz, with an oud and buzuq - short and long-necked cousins of the lute - alongside a jazz quartet; or Mary Halvorson, who's connecting a classic jazz-guitar sound and sensibility (like that of Jim Hall, a quieter jazz elder, who also played at the festival) with its opposite, basically aggression, noise, hyperactivity. The pianist Jon Batiste and bassist Esperanza Spalding are only 26 and 28, but they're fast-tracking toward heroism, aiming to get all listeners on their side immediately: an impossible goal, but they're persuasive. Ms. Spalding's set, with her wide-ranging Radio Music Society, used a big-band horn section, pop and funk grooves, and her serene, flexible singing; Mr. Batiste played bebop and New Orleans rhythm and early jazz. Mr. Batiste seems more teacherly, but they are both complicated machines of American musical history, and they won't rest until they've won you. A couple of singers this weekend came from a more "70s or early "80s-oriented place in the African-American jazz tradition, strong and sometimes experimental yet serenely unacademic, and they were mightily good. One was Dee Alexander, from Chicago, who sang standards and semicosmic originals, turning her voice into birdsong or a synthesizer or a Tibetan monk chant. The other was Gregory Porter, a powerful baritone who writes his own songs. Neither of them have gonzo youthful vitality; they're hitting their stride midlife. They're not shredders, sound inventors or bringing an X-meets-Y concept. They're not turning themselves out to make their case. But they, too, could be among this festival's next heroes.