The indefatigable Victorian spinster Marianne North (1830-1890) is the most interesting artist you've never heard of. The upper-middle-class Ms North thought marriage a terrible experiment, and with her single state allowing her control of her fortune, she took to cultural and physical independence. Her rich landowner father, Frederick, MP for Hastings, knew everyone who was everyone, including Sir William Hooker, director of Kew. 

Lead singer and frontman Ed Robertson launches into a BNL-in-London rap, extolling the Roundhouse, “where they used to turn trains”, as well as the glories of Camden Market’s liquid-nitrogen ice-cream bar. The crowd, with its distinctly Cold Feet demographic, goes wild for the Ladies – if you’re not familiar with them, there are no women in this Canadian band – and their new album, Silverball, named in honour of Robertson’s pinball obsession, has been hailed as a buoyant return to form.

The Montréal International Jazz Festival's 37th edition presented its accustomed surfeit of gigs, covering the complete range from concert hall spectaculars to small club sessions. A large part of this, the globe's biggest jazzfest, is the massive-scale freebie shows on various outdoor stages. The festival completely takes over Montréal's downtown centre, which just happens to be this French-speaking city’s cultural area.

Music is so often about context, some music more than others. Such is the case with the latest album – the third – from Canadian electronic bolshies MSTRKRFT. It’s wilfully obnoxious, caustic stuff, a battering techno-based assault that cares not a jot for the classy deep house smoothness Disclosure et al have brought to dance music, nor, for that matter, the energized Ritalin frolicking of EDM. It’s closer in tone to The Prodigy’s battering last album, although on OPERATOR MSTRKRFT care even less about pop, polish and funk.

Canada has been Uncle Sam’s body-double in countless drama productions. Shooting on location is easier and cheaper north of the border. One twinkly city skyline looks very much like another. 19-2 is set in and around car number two as it patrols the clean streets of the 19th district of Montreal. And yes, from the very first moments – “Maybe we should call for back-up?” – it feels like we’ve been here before.

I could tell you what the German word "Betroffenheit" means by giving a dictionary definition, etymology and connotations and so on. But I won't, because this dance-drama hybrid by Jonathan Young and Crystal Pite is precisely not about pinning down definitions or making sense through words in a descriptive, iterative sort of way, but about capturing feelings or states of being in a much more metaphorical, experiential, immersive way. Betroffenheit is in one sense, then, the feeling you have after watching the show Betroffenheit.

“We’ve been visiting libraries on this tour and it’s a lot of fun learning people still read.” The words of The Burning Hell’s main man Mathias Kom before launching into “Give Up” stress he and his band are not typical rock‘n’rollers. “Give Up” itself is the rollicking song-story of a call-centre worker who goes to a library, finds inspiration in Herman Melville and then meets a mysterious woman who rings in. She gives him a poster of a kitten captioned “Never Give Up”. In the song’s pay off, Kom’s protagonist declares “when the going gets tough, I give up.”

The cape is not an everyday item of clothing. Worn by magicians, it brings an air of the extraordinary. It billows in the path of superheroes. The cloak of invisibility confirms the cape’s singularity. Basia Bulat was first seen in a sparkly gold cape on the sleeve of her recent Good Advice album and last night it was integral to the renewed vigour of her music and stage persona. Moved to say how hard it was play guitar with its folds fluttering, she nonetheless did not take the easy path and discard it.

Poor Alice. She’s alone all day, with a six-month baby boy, while her husband Ben – a doctor – is out at work. Working all hours. She sleeps at odd times of the day, and at first seems to have just suffered some kind of catastrophic loss. Ben seems to be working too much, so the couple never see each other. I say “seems” because it is very soon apparent that things are really not what they seem in Québecoise actress and playwright Catherine-Anne Toupin’s brilliant 2008 play about one woman’s sense of self, and her conflicting emotions about motherhood. Oh, poor Alice.

Before Canadian comedian and British TV panel show regular Stewart Francis arrives on stage his audience are entertained with his one-panel cartoons. These, Sharpie-penned in black, are projected as a slideshow (sample: in a fishbowl, one fish says to the other, “It’s all kicked off again in the Middle East” – title “Topical Fish”). It’s unfortunate that whoever set this up couldn’t be bothered to centre the image, since a good quota of the jokes' key lines were rendered non-existent, chopped off at the top.