Guardian Music — (Edition Records)Tom Cawley, the former Acoustic Ladyland pianist, is currently sharing his time between this award-winning trio and Peter Gabriel's touring band. On this album he has sought to capture Curios' live rapport, and now varies the band's... more info

Guardian Music — Kings Place, LondonOn the last night of the Jazz Scene Europe mini-festival at Kings Place, saxophonist Andy Sheppard shared the fruits of the post-1960s emancipation of jazz from US ownership that now embraces a host of regional variations.Sheppard ... more info

Guardian Music — (Leaf)In the same way as it was impossible to imagine an Art Blakey or Elvin Jones group without those two percussion geniuses, it's impossible to imagine Polar Bear with anyone but Seb Rochford on the drum stool. The once Mercury-nominated group's t... more info

Guardian Music — Loop Festival, LondonPianist Kit Downes, the young Royal Academy graduate who first emerged with the much-acclaimed band Empirical, is one of the influential new British jazz artists on London's Loop Collective's programme. Downes was taught by forme... more info

Guardian Music — Ronnie Scott's, LondonCutting-edge pianists who blossomed as emigres – Doncaster-raised John Escreet as a student in Manhattan; Belgrade-born Bojan Z as a prize-winning innovator in France – showed Ronnie Scott's this week that while th... more info

Guardian Music — The only thing you could really expect from jazz in the noughties was the unexpectedJazz sounds different now; different from the way it sounded in the century that spawned it. It's not that over the last 10 years musicians have stopped improvising p... more info

Guardian Music — Beak>, On tourIt takes Portishead 10 long and fairly painful years to make an album. Strangely, though, for Beak>, the project of Geoff Barrow, Portishead's disarmingly un-starry producer, the whole process seems a good deal less fraught. In fact, fo... more info

Guardian Music — Paul Morley introduces his alternative view of the decade that wasI don't know about you – and I'll just get this out of my system before the ghost of Christmas past comes to give me what for – but if there's one thing worse than a care... more info

Guardian Music — She used to scour bars looking for gigs. Now Gwyneth Herbert is being compared to Lennon and McCartneyWhen Gwyneth Herbert was discovered – almost overnight, at the age of 22 – she was a singer with a rich contralto voice who wrote fic... more info

Said the Gramophone — Sgt Dunbar & the Hobo Banned - "Everything Is, Pt. III". Messy. The kind of guy whose bracelets always break, whose watches slip off his wrist and shatter on the asphalt. Very good at climbing walls. Favourite movie is The Great Escape. One day he ... more info