I met Mark Stewart once. It was on a platform at Clapham Junction, I wouldn’t normally approach a famous person like that, but I felt I had to pay my respects. It turned out he was getting on my train – going down to Dorset to “visit his old Ma” – and we talked on and off down to Southampton. He was hilarious, half scholar and gentleman, half lively uncle at a family function loudly telling old-school “blue” jokes, all in the thickest West Country burr this side of The Wurzels.

There's something luminous about the Brad Mehldau Trio. The music they create with such joy shines with a special clarity, in which ever-changing forms constantly reveal lines of shared thought, explicitly, yet purveying an abiding sense of wonder. Intellect – and there is plenty of that – is matched here with the fire of inspiration and the thrill of constant surprise.

When I was writing the introduction to my book, Bass, Mids, Tops: An Oral History of Soundsystem Culture, I came up with a phrase, which I ended up putting on promotional badges: “BASS CULTURE IS FOLK CULTURE”. It referred to the way riffs, refrains, ways of acting were passed down the generations, from reggae to rave to grime and on. But it also quickly took on more meaning, about where soundsystem and club music exist in society.

There is an atmosphere of otherworldly stillness within the stony womb of a large dilapidated church in Bristol, at the bottom of St Michael’s Hill, the winding road that climbs up to what used to be the favoured place of execution, where the city’s sombre gibbets stood.

It’s difficult to believe that the last stop-motion Wallace and Gromit short graced our screens way back in 2008. Describing the pair’s new outing as a return to form is unnecessary: this duo never lost it in the first place.

The Marriage of Figaro is undoubtedly one of the greatest operas ever written. Mozart’s masterpiece is a display of musical perfection that never ceases to touch the heart and stimulate the musical mind.

Apart from being one of Britain’s greatest songsmiths of the past 50 years, Elvis Costello – from the early adoption of the rock’n’roll King’s first name – has produced a form of naked self-expression, blurred by intricately-tailored pretence. Though this is “art”, never artifice.

Something of a jazz supergroup this one: with drum virtuoso, the ubiquitous Seb Rochford, Jim Bar of Get the Blessing, Adrian Utley – formerly of Portishead, a prolific collaborator and producer, but with a heart rooted in jazz, and sax and flute-player Larry Stabbins, among other credits a  co-founder of Working Week, recently returned from 10 years’ sailing around the world.

Kwame Owusu’s 55-minute one-hander does just what it says on the tin: it features a young student who dreams he is drowning. But its brevity is no bar to its being a dense and intense experience, worthy winner of last year’s Mustapha Matura Award.

As second-wave feminism vouched in the late 1960s, the personal is political. For Billy Nomates, the moniker of Sleaford Mods-approved musician Tor Maries, that sentiment is rife.