All of the last-minute decision-making was supposed to take place on stage when Other Minds programmed a remarkable roster of jazz-influenced improvisers for Moment’s Notice, the 25th edition of the San Francisco organization’s flagship new-music festival in 2020.

But instead of presenting master musicians creating spontaneous compositions, Harry Bernstein, the event’s guest artistic director, found himself caught in a “Groundhog Day” nightmare, rebooking the festival again and again as the pandemic waxed and waned.

He’s still monitoring every twitch in the COVID-19 transmission rate trackers, but the portents look favorable for the multigenerational concert series set to take place Thursday-Sunday, Oct. 14-17, at the War Memorial Veterans Building’s fourth-floor Taube Atrium Theater.

“It’s been an agony,” said Bernstein, who managed to keep most of the artists on the festival’s initial roster on board for this year’s event. “We were scheduled for April 2020 when the pandemic hit, and I rescheduled it twice before this.”

Even after Other Minds settled on the latest dates, COVID travel restrictions from Europe and health concerns for some of the older musicians forced several late-breaking changes. Fortunately, the Bay Area’s deep pool of talent ensured that the festival’s cutting-edge offerings remained sharp, with the East Bay duo of saxophonist Larry Ochs and drummer Donald Robinson stepping in Saturday, Oct. 16, for trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith’s multimedia piece “Meditations and Reflections on Monk.”

节日持续的长期relationship with Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, Saturday’s program also includes 81-year-old saxophonist, composer and sound explorer Roscoe Mitchell, who performs with a triumvirate he calls Trio Five. The capaciously inventive Brooklyn alto saxophonist Darius Jones, who rarely performs in the Bay Area, is slated to open the program with an unaccompanied set, drawing on his new solo saxophone album “Raw Demoon Alchemy (A Lone Operation).”

Focusing on luminaries from the amorphous, undefinable realm where free improvised music converges with various avant-garde jazz idioms, the festival features a series of intriguing bills in addition to Saturday’s program that bring together strikingly individual and deeply interconnected artists. While often exploring without a road map, the musicians shape the musical terrain in real time, a process that requires big ears, intrepid spirit and incisive melodic imagination.

Conveyance Media is live-streaming the entire festival, offering a worldwide audience a deep dive into the music with intermission features, artist interviews and live voice-over by expert hosts, including longtime jazz critic Nate Chinen, editorial director for the New Jersey public radio jazz station WBGO.

The festival’s last day presents a program that is equally generous, with Mitchell’s AACM colleague and fellow National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master Anthony Braxton, who at 76 is also in the midst of an extraordinarily productive late-career run. A duo encounter between pianist Sylvie Courvoisier and guitarist Mary Halvorson, a dauntingly prolific artist even before being awarded a 2019 MacArthur Fellowship, opens the show, followed by an eight-string guitar solo set by Elliott Sharp, a creative force in experimental music for more than four decades.

“As best I could I wanted Moment’s Notice to represent the depth and breadth of this artistry,” Bernstein said. “It’s staggering. I didn’t want it to be pigeonholed geographically, and I wanted to make sure it was gender balanced because there are so many amazing women in this music.”

No artist better exemplifies the essential space that Other Minds occupies than the singular New York multilingual vocalist, multi-instrumentalist and performance artist Jen Shyu, whose solo piece “Nine Doors” concludes the festival’s opening program on its opening night. She has built an international career since she started performing on the San Francisco jazz scene while studying music at Stanford University in the late 1990s, but Shyu’s last Bay Area performance took place in 2015 at the now-shuttered Oakland performance space Studio Grand.

A condensed version of a larger work inspired by the death of her friend Sri Joko Raharjo, a master of Javanese shadow puppetry, “Nine Doors” is a ritual, tribute and remembrance that reflects Shyu’s two-decade immersion in a succession of traditional Asian musical styles. It’s a theatrical form of her own construction that encompasses song, dance, chant, Taiwanese moon lute, Korean zither and soribuk drum, Japanese biwa, piano, and Timorese and Korean gongs.

“The core of the story is about my dear friend who was killed in a car crash right after I returned from Indonesia,” said Shyu, who noted that she originally presented the work in a much larger context with 10 musicians and a dancer. “Musically it’s still based on that structure, but I knew I’d make a solo version. I love the solo format. It’s such a challenge. I’m responsible for all the storytelling and music.”

Choreography also figures prominently in the program on Friday, Oct. 15, which centers on “The Sky Is Trembling,” a presentation by William Parker on bass, flutes and brass; Hamid Drake on percussion and voice; and dancer Patricia Nicholson. Creative and life partners since the early 1970s, Parker and Nicholson have long played an outsize role on the experimental music scene. Though he usually gets the credit, Parker notes that it was Nicholson who founded and directs the Vision Festival, which since 1996 has reigned as New York’s premier free improv showcase.

Imbued with the idealism and world-building ethos that animates many of their endeavors, “The Sky Is Trembling” reflects “a reaction to our treatment of the Earth, and to what we do to and for each other,” Parker said.

“我们所有的碎片与灵性和politics, with a social message of how we should be living,” he added. “If you inspire people and get them to activate their imagination, they will be on the right track.”

Other Minds Festival 25:8 p.m. Oct. 14-16, 4 p.m. Oct. 17. Taube Atrium Theater, War Memorial Veterans Building, 401 Van Ness Ave., S.F. $25-$55, $10 live stream per show.www.otherminds.org