The forecast for Newport on Sunday, August 10, was not altogether promising: scattered thunderstorms, starting in mid-afternoon and continuing into the evening. But the forecast was wrong. The weather was beautiful all day, sunny but not too hot, and not a drop of rain fell until late at night.

It would be foolish to look for any deeper meaning here. But if you want to believe that God is a jazz fan, and that He wanted to make sure this year’s Newport Jazz Festival finished on a positive note, be my guest.

The beauty of the day was not lost on the festival’s headliner, Sonny Rollins, making his first Newport appearance in nobody could remember exactly how many years. Looking out from the Fort Adams State Park stage at the bright sunshine, the puffy clouds, the boats in the harbor and the ecstatic crowd, Sonny announced at one point: “It’s so beautiful out here, ladies and gentlemen, that I don’t know what to do with myself.”

I knew just how he felt.

He might as well have been talking about not just the setting but the music — his own (he was in exceptional form, especially on the uptempo numbers, if a bit logy and unfocused on the ballads) and everyone else’s. There was so much good music to be heard at Newport on Sunday that my Significant Other and I didn’t know what to do with ourselves.

More to the point, we often didn’t know where to go. It’s a churlish complaint, I know, but our biggest problem this year was that too often there were too many great things going on at the same time.

We love Lionel Loueke, the inventive African guitarist, but we caught only the beginning of his set on the Pavilion Stage because we didn’t want to miss George Wein and the latest (and most eclectic) edition of his Newport All Stars on the main stage. After that we rushed over to the Waterside Stage, where we had been tipped off that the act billed only as “Newport Surprise” would be Bill Frisell — who sounded a lot looser and more energetic working with his own rhythm section than he had the day before with Ethan Iverson and Charlie Haden.

We stayed there to see Esperanza Spalding, who was certainly the breakout star of the festival, and as a result missed much of Herbie Hancock’s set — no great loss, since as far as we could tell it was essentially the same disappointing mixed-bag set we had seen him do at the JVC festival in New York. And in between Herbie and Sonny, we dashed back to the Waterside Stage to see as much as we could of Marco Benevento, a keyboard madman whose music might be called fusion for a new generation. In addition to his own compositions, he played (with great power and imagination) selections from the songbooks of My Morning Jacket, Deerhoof and, believe it or not, Led Zeppelin.

Our day started in grand style with Guillermo Klein y Los Guachos. Well, actually it started with Ameranouche, an acoustic trio that played guitar jazz in the Django Reinhardt tradition. We had never heard of them, but they were playing on the Waterside Stage as we entered the festival grounds and headed toward the main stage, and their music was so infectious it stopped us in our tracks.

Still, we made it to the main stage in time to catch Klein’s entire set, and we were glad we did. One of the major finds of the festival for us (although he has been performing, in New York and elsewhere, for some time), he’s an Argentine pianist who led a dazzling 11-piece ensemble that served as a showcase for his equally dazzling compositions. Hard to pin down stylistically, his music partakes of Latin rhythms, classical harmonies and jazz concepts — although, oddly enough, the composer he most reminded me of was Frank Zappa: something about the long, twisty melody lines, the tricky time signatures, the element of surprise.

There were plenty of excellent soloists in the ensemble (he himself rarely soloed), but for me the greatest joy of listening to Klein’s music, at least on this occasion, was not so much the improvisation as the writing, which sounded like nothing I had ever heard before and yet instantly familiar.

Klein was clearly thrilled to be at Newport. “It’s a pleasure playing here,” he told the crowd. “It’s amazing. It’s such a gift.”

I knew just how he felt.

Guillermo Klein