Jazzfest has managed to succeed as a mainstream rock festival. The first weekend’s headliners on the main Acura Stage included John Mayer, Billy Joel and Dave Matthews, while this weekend promises Fleetwood Mac, Maroon 5 and The Black Keys. If the aforementioned suggest a festival devoted to AOR chart-topping US rock, then understand that the festival’s organisers allow the superstars to drag in suburban rock fans, thus underwriting the rich regional music flavours that dominate most of the other 11 stages.

A crowd of men and younger women in full burkahs gathers, bewildered by the sight: an African woman, in West African “Mumu” (khaftan) and a covered head, playing Ghazals (Islamic calls to prayer). Accompanied by an acoustic guitar, a clear voice, sitting on a café terrazza, Nawal transports us: until it is broken. “How dare you use the name of Allah in a song?!” cries out a dishevelled street vendor, visibly upset. “But you use keyboards in your praise of Allah” she retorts calmly.

The line-up for this year's Glasgow International Comedy Festival has been announced. The festival, now in its 11th year, takes place 14-31 March with 411 show at 46 venues in Scotland's second city.

I've always keenly anticipated Derevo. A rare sight in London, they are the must-catch company in a singular branch of mime theatre - some would call it clowning, from an oblique, dark place of visions, fears and childlike imaginings. They are a small monkish Russian troupe who with apparent heedless aim have for the past 25 years been snatching at history, fantasy, antique commedia dell' arte, and the rubbish-strewn street in productions that often leave your brain spinning with questions but your heart twanging with comprehension.

The Mayan calendar recently suggested it was all over. It is now, almost. 2012 was, by anyone’s lights, an annus mirabilis for culture on these shores. The world came to the United Kingdom, and the kingdom was indeed more or less united by a genuine aura of inclusion. Clumps of funding were hurled in the general direction of the Cultural Olympiad, which became known as the London 2012 Festival, and all sorts leapt aboard. Just for a start, those opera companies who had been burning to perform a version of Vivaldi's L'Olimpiade could now finally proceed.

It was predestined that Lou Doillon would shadow her half-sister Charlotte Gainsbourg and their mother Jane Birkin by going into music. More surprising is that her full-length calling card, debut album Places, is entirely written by her. The female members of her clan have generally relied on material from outside, so Doillon is a trailblazer. Part of the annual Trans Musicales festival, this show at Salle de la Cité in Rennes, Brittany’s rain-soaked capital, was an opportunity to discover what she’s about before the UK release of Places next spring.

Guitar virtuoso RM Hubbert is something of an unlikely champion of quiet music. In fact, if you haven’t yet heard the gorgeous Thirteen Lost and Found, the Chemikal Underground debut on which the guitarist invited friends including Aidan Moffat, Alex Kapranos and Alasdair Roberts to supplement the instrumentals with which he made his name, you might wonder what Hubbert - a heavily-tattooed onetime member of various Glasgow hardcore bands - is doing co-curating a festival with the unlikely label of Shhh!

Squeezing nearly 300 events into the 10-day dash that is the London Jazz Festival, which has just ended required dozens of venues – many not regular presenters of jazz – to open their doors. From the 606 Club in the west to Oliver’s Bar in Greenwich in the east, the Finchley Arts Depot in the north to the Hideaway down south in Streatham, it is in the pubs, clubs and community venues of London that the jazz festival’s heart beats.

Nightclub Tähti is on the seventh floor of an anonymous-looking building along Tampere’s main shopping street, Hämeenkatu. Black-suited security wave you into a lift which zips straight up there. After surrendering your coat at the cloakroom – obligatory in Finland - a walk around the bar reveals the dance floor. The couples occupying it are doing the Finnish tango, a measured, understated version of the dance. Finnish schlager is the soundtrack, a sort of native-language Eighties’ electropop with emotive crescendos. It rarely strays from the mid-paced.

Irish theatre generates high expectations. So much so, that if there isn’t a premiere of a play by one of Ireland’s leading playwrights – Sebastian Barry, Enda Walsh, Marina Carr, Frank McGuinness, Martin McDonagh, Conor McPherson or Mark O’Rowe – the annual Dublin Theatre Festival tends to be viewed by regular Dublin theatregoers as somehow deficient. But while this year’s festival didn’t offer a singularly brilliant piece of new Irish playwriting, in its range and diversity it posed a series of very provocative questions.