If the three-day Songlines Encounters Festival got off to a rousing start with folk-punk rowdiness from Poland’s R.U.T.A, by last night things were decidedly more genteel. The Festival, anyway, was an exhilarating musical voyage. Spiro’s last album is called Kaleidophonica, and sports a dizzying cover. Rather than the lysergic rush that might suggest, their music is pastoral but as intricate as a Swiss watch, seemingly restrained but with visionary undercurrents.

With the yelling and posturing, R.U.T.A. are clearly a punk band, but it’s like no punk band you’ve ever heard before. The lyrics are in Polish, for one thing, and there are no guitars, but Middle Eastern lutes, archaic fiddles and a battery of percussion. They only formed last year, but already R.U.T.A. – a jokey acronym for the Movement of Utopia, Transcendence and Anarchy - have stirred up controversy.

Relentlessly energetic, opinionated, and never less than passionate about music-making, Ilan Volkov is a close as you get to a prodigy in the world of conducting. Appointed as Young Conductor in association with the Northern Sinfonia at just 19, at 28 Volkov became the youngest ever chief conductor of a BBC orchestra, and almost 10 years later still continues his relationship with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra as their Principal Guest Conductor.

Soweto Kinch's set last night as part of the eXplorations mini-series featured gluttony, envy and a host of other vices. No, not A Life in the Day of an Investment Banker, but a tantalising glimpse of Kinch's take on the Seven Deadly Sins.

The band's Facebook page states “Dirty Soulful Groovin Dancey Sweet” under genre. To which I'd add “Dramatic Playful Intense Voluptuous Transporting”. Performing last night as part of the London A Cappella Festival, The Boxettes swept away any residual festive cobwebs and dazzled a packed Kings Place. “Loosen your shirt, loosen your bow ties,” we were told. I have to confess I didn't actually see any bow ties, but, metaphorically speaking, we got the point.

This weekend’s three-day Minimalism festival at Kings Place comes to an end tonight looking at the cross-over between rock and new music in New York in the Seventies. It seems to me that the collision between popular and high-art music produced some of the most dynamic movements of the 20^th century, not only in New York.

There aren't too many pianists who excite jazz aficionados and hip-hop fans in equal measure. But then no other artist has been inspired equally by hip-hop beats on the one hand and Thelonious Monk on the other. And while it appears increasingly that jazz artists are refusing to be straitjacketed by genre convention, US pianist Robert Glasper is perhaps the prime example of this blurring at the edges.