The proudest legacy of the late Dr. Billy Taylor's reign as the Kennedy Center's artistic director for jazz is, by his own account, the annual Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival. "It was the first thing I wanted to do at the Kennedy Center," he told me in a 2009 interview. "When I told them, they said, 'Can you find enough women?' I came back with 100. There are women now playing all kinds of jazz, all instruments; now you don't hear what I heard when I was a kid: 'She plays nice for a girl.'"

This is the festival's 16th year—and its first without Taylor. Doubtless there will be some form of tribute to the festival's founder and benefactor at this week's program, which runs May 19-21. It won't be the only tribute: The Friday night installment (which is sold out) features a salute to the recently departed singing great Abbey Lincoln by vocalists Dee Dee Bridgewater (also the festival's host for the third year running), Dianne Reeves, and Cassandra Wilson, and an ensemble led by music director Terri Lyne Carrington.

But if you can't get tickets, don't despair. There's extraordinary stuff to be heard on Thursday and Saturday nights as well. Thursday features returning favorite Janis Siegel, as well as fellow Manhattan Transfer member Laurel Massé and New York Voices singer Lauren Kinhan, in the vocal group JaLaLa. But it also features two of the most exciting up-and-comers in jazz. Flutist Jamie Baum (who performs with her septet) and saxophonist Tia Fuller (who performs with her quartet) aren’t big names, but have earned this kind of high-profile showcase; look for them to prove it.

Saturday night, the closer, is even bigger. Corky Hale, who's been working over 50 years, has the weighty job title of singer/pianist/flutist/harpist, the big feature of the night. But pianist Peggy Stern and saxophonist Sue Terry come close, and singer Marlena Shaw offers a spectacular ensemble featuring Jami Dauber (trumpet, flugelhorn); Janelle Reichman (sax), Tomoko Ohno (piano), Noriko Ueda (bass), and Sherrie Maricle (drums).

Oh, and lest we forget, somewhere among these names you'll also hear an announcement of this year's winner (one of five as-yet-unannounced pianists); and, on the Millennium Stage, vocalist Charenée Wade, the runner-up at last year's Thelonious Monk Competition (and this writer's choice to win), and over two nights, the eight women chosen for this year's second Emerging Artist Workshop. Now that's a festival.

PRELUDE
Dee Dee Bridgewater was wearing a cowboy hat. If she explained this, I missed it.

ANNE DRUMMOND
Drummond, a flutist, began by duetting with bassist Brandi Disterheft on her original "Swing Thing," then brought out her quartet (Klaus Mueller on piano, Mauricio Zotarelli on drums) for the Brazilian standard "Melancia." The band has a clear division of labor. Disterheft is an extremely percussive bassist, her fingers striking the strings like hammers (a la Jimmy Blanton); Mueller's piano playing is surprisingly flutelike and often doubled with Drummond (who herself took over piano for her piece "Elan").

Drummond was a solid flute player, with excellent technique and musical logic on the undervalued-in-jazz instrument (and enough zeal that she could be heard humming along with herself); on the eighty-eights, she was perhaps even more interesting than Mueller, albeit with less skill. This critic would have liked to hear some less conventional note choices on the reed, but this critic is also a sucker for jazz flute and forgives the small stuff.

INTERLUDE 1
The winner of this year's Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Competition, focused on piano, is Carmen Staaf. The prize? She gets to perform at the 2010 Festival, a banner year since it's Williams' centennial.

CARMEN LUNDY
For better or worse, our fair city inspires performers to patriotism, but Lundy gets special credit for a lovely reharmonization of "America the Beautiful." The rest of her songs were all from her own considerable catalog. The band were subdued for most of the set, perhaps to simply stay out of the way of the vocalist's outsize personality; unfortunately, while the restraint of bassist Kenny Davis, drummer Steve Williams, and percussionist Mayra Casales helped in that regard, pianist Bill O'Connell came off as a cocktail-lounge pianist, throwing in the kinds of minor flourishes you might expect from Don Ho.

Thankfully, Lundy's gifts as singer and composer more than made up the difference. Highlights were "Gossip," inspired by Oprah Winfrey—rhythmically oblong, melodically complex, and tremendously fun—and the closing "All the Names Are God," in which the whole band finally threw caution to the wind and played their asses off (especially Casales, with a fine conga solo).

INTERLUDE 2
Dee Dee lost the cowboy hat. "I took my hat off to my sister, Carmen Lundy!" she explained.

MARIA SCHNEIDER
Schneider is a major figure, one whom critic Francis Davis has argued belongs in the top of the jazz composers' pantheon with Ellington and her mentor Gil Evans. Her work at the close of the night only lends support to that argument. Harmonically rich and texturally painstaking, Schneider's music is also loaded with tenderness, and her ensemble's great strength is the beauty with which they reflect it.

So do the individuals: Nate Radley has a liquid guitar tone that pools into gorgeous melody; Ryan Keberle's trombone is somehow both loud and languid; and Gary Versace's accordion is alien, yet deeply human. The arsenal's greatest weapons, though, are undoubtedly pianist Frank Kimbrough and drummer Clarence Penn, neither of whom soloed and both of whom were the engines of each song.

Great performances included the opening "Concert in the Garden;" "Blue Skies," featuring a sweet, sad, hopeful soprano sax by Steve Wilson; and the closing "Cerulean Skies," a programmatic piece about the migration of birds that showcased the entire band and ascended into the sublime. Jazz fans who don't know Schneider's work are horribly, horribly deprived.

POST-LUDE
Next year's Centennial festival will feature an all-woman band with Bridgewater, Esperanza Spalding, Teri Lyne Carrington, Geri Allen, and teenage phenomenon Grace Kelly performing Williams' music. Hot damn.

HAILEY NISWANGER
Winner of last year's Women in Jazz Festival Competition, Hailey Niswanger is an alto saxophonist—19 years old and a student at Berklee. She thus walks a fine line: How much do you criticize a kid who's still learning the basics? Is her position one where criticism is more important or more irrelevant than it'll ever be again?

But it turns out there's not much to criticize. Niswanger is a gifted and very skilled saxophonist who's working to develop her own sound. Her tone is hard as sheet metal, but with a softer, piccolo-like whine at the edges; in soloing, she's awfully reliant on bebop devices, but that's to be expected from a young student. She audibly strives to break out of them when she can, and it helps that Niswanger chooses quirky tunes like Monk's "Four in One" and Kenny Dorham's "Page One," along with a neat original blues called "Confeddie." The only substantive critique to make is that she seems afraid to leave spaces in her solos—a sign of insecurity—but that, too, will dissolve as she develops. This kid's got a very bright future.

INTERLUDE
The Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Award for lifetime achievement is given to Sherrie Maricle, drummer and leader of the band Diva:

"Wow. I'm not usually speechless but this time I am."

(cue seven pause-free minutes of talking)

"So I wasn't so speechless after all!"

ANNETTE AGUILAR & STRINGBEAN
Wow!

Upon introduction, Annette A. Aguilar sat behind her army of congas and began playing fiercely while the seven other members of Stringbean slowly filled in around her. The minute the stage was full, Each one took up a percussive instrument and began a polyrhythmic explosion. That was the recurring theme of Aguilar's set: they would play two or three pieces from Brazil or Cuba, then return to a purely percussive framework . The results were spectacular, with the show's midpoint—which Aguilar called "Bean Dip"—as the highlight.

On more melodic pieces, the results were almost as good. The combo of vocals, violin, harp, piano, bass, and drums was exotic and beautiful; Ellen Uryevick Adams's harp and Nicki Denner's piano meshed in unexpected ways, and Rob Thomas's violin frequently went in unison with lead singer Sofia Rei Koutsovitis. But it was probably inevitable that these sounds would often get lost in the warehouse of percussion surrounding them, especially on the Brazilian Bahia tune "Bebe" and Ray Baretto's salsa "Indestructible" (although Aguilar's switch to marimbas saved the melodic line on the latter). Still, it was splendid.

DEE DEE BRIDGEWATER
Bridgewater is also the host for this year's festival, intro- and outro-ing every artist and inserting lively banter in between. (Thursday's highlight: "From here, Anat Cohen travels to Idaho, where they grow all those potatoes, and Juneau, Alaska...where teenage girls get pregnant.") So the audience knew what a ham she was. But her stage act was still a bit surprising. She wore a loose-fitting, backless dress, and when she began dancing fiercely during her opening "Afro Blue" it several times threatened a Janet Jackson reprise, but that may have been tame next to her downright erotic routine against her stool during Nina Simone's "Four Women." Suffice to say she might have oversold the material a bit.

Even if it wasn't so family-friendly, though, Bridgewater's set was wondrous. She is a truly great singer with an astonishing stylistic range; a ballad delivery of "Footprints" was followed by an excellent Billie Holiday impression on "Good Morning Heartache," which was followed by awesome '60s-soul fire on "Compared to What." Credit goes as well to the extraordinarily tight band: pianist Edsel Gomez, bassist Ira Coleman, drummer Vince Cherico, and percussionist Luisito Quintero were in fine form and worked brilliantly together without ever overpowering Bridgewater. If she had taken a sedative beforehand the set might have been perfect.

PRELUDE
Host Dee Dee Bridgewater is probably the world's sexiest 59-year-old bald woman.

ACT ONE
24-year-old Esperanza Spalding's star is rising—she's the youngest-ever instructor at Berklee; has appeared on Letterman and Kimmel; and played the White House twice this year. It's not hard to see why, since she's even more talented than she is charming and self-confident.

But she's also callow. Spalding's dexterous bass playing was completely overshadowed last night by her singing (probably deliberately so, since both acoustic and electric bass were terribly miked), challenging her own statement that bass is her focus and singing is a lark. Unfortunately, her singing needs work; she subserviated it so much to the rhythm, reciting fast and indistinctly, that the lyrics lost too much meaning. She's also too absorbed in her own material: Spalding's imaginative 5/4 arrangement of "Body & Soul" was the highlight of her set, and one of only two non-originals. She could use more apprenticeship in the standard repertoire, along with some artistic restraint. But that's okay...a Women in Jazz Festival should be about potential, too.

ACT TWO
Clarinetist/saxophonist Anat Cohen is also young—34—but has mastered her craft, including leadership of the 16-piece Anzic Orchestra. Their "pan-American" set included Latin showpieces, standards, and classic jazz tunes made famous by Johnny Griffin and Benny Goodman. At her best, though, Cohen combined these styles in medleys: "Marie en la Playa" met "Puttin' on the Ritz," and in the showstopper, "Samba de Orfeo" segued into Louis Armstrong's "Struttin' with Some Bar-B-Q" (with excellent trumpet soloing by Freddy Hendrick and Cohen's brother Avishai.) But Cohen always kept the spotlight, her clarinet both searching and growling, sly and ponderous. She's seems better every time she picks up the axe, making up for her surprisingly nondescript style on tenor sax.

ACT THREE
One quarter of schmaltz-pop-jazz group Manhattan Transfer, Janis Siegel is just about the same in solo performance. Her accompanists (pianist Edsel Gomez, bassist Drew Gress, drummer Steve Hass) were fantastic and would make a great trio unto themselves. But Siegel was feverishly melodramatic, particularly on the opening "Hidden Place," where she fused Barbra Streisand's oversinging with Diane Keaton's overacting. The rest of the set, which included Stevie Wonder's "I Cant' Help It" and the potboiler "Jeepers Creepers," was slightly more subdued without really being much less ridiculous. Getting it out of the way on the first night was just as well.

But Williams' name is not well known outside of the jazz aficionados, in large part because jazz isn't popularly associated with women.

How better to combat that than with the Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival, which the Kennedy Center has held every May since 1996? Tellingly, its founder — jazz director Dr. Billy Taylor — had a tough time getting it started, telling City Paper earlier this year that "when I told them I wanted to do a women’s jazz festival, they didn’t believe I’d find enough women to justify a big feature. I was able to immediately give them a list of 100 women.”

Since then, however, it's become a major event in the institution's calendar, a regular showcase for innovators and virtuosi like bandleader Maria Schneider, clarinetist Anat Cohen, and young bassist Esperanza Spaulding, all of whom are on this year's schedule.

That schedule, by the way, starts tonight, and continues to Saturday. It'll be recapped here by yours truly.