There are moments when a very great jazz musician makes her or his ideas flow naturally, unstoppably and with complete conviction. And when one is in a tiny venue and can feel the joyous intensity with which every single person in the room is listening… there are few if any musical experiences that can match it.

Quite how Shabaka Hutchings manages to be Shabaka Hutchings is one of the great mysteries of modern culture, and one that could probably teach us all a lot of value to society if we ever worked it out. From the devastating energy of The Comet Is Coming and Sons Of Kemet to the gentlest of shakuhachi experiments posted near daily on his social media, he consistently pushes the boundaries of style and genre. He’s played with everyone from Courtney Pine to the Sun Ra Arkestra, Mulatu Astatke to the Ligeti String Quartet, and he’s still only in his thirties.

The Oslo World organisers are at pains to point out that, despite the name, they are not a “world music” festival. And with good reason, really. There may have been a few familiar WOMAD veterans headlining over the week-long event – Senegal’s Youssou N’Dour, Malie's Fatoumata Diawara, the queen of Cuba Omara Portuondo – but the emphasis was emphatically not on any kind of beads-and-bongoes authenticity.

There’s retro and there’s retro. Some music – what you might call the Oasis tendency – simply reproduces the obvious signifiers of the past as signposts of cool. But there’s other stuff that shows deep understanding of both the technique and the spirit of what came before, that really taps into the same wellsprings that created the sound it’s replicating in the first place.

“For life to exist, we need rhythm” announces Ian Parmel on the opening track of rising UK jazz saxophonist Xhosa Cole’s sophomore album. This is a view that Xhosa has taken to heart – for while his debut album was awash with echoes of John Coltrane’s classic hard bop sounds, Ibeji comprises a collection of saxophone and percussion collaborations with seven separate drummers, which explore West African beats and musical flavours through a jazz lens.

Beth Orton has never rushed her music. Her first four albums came one every three years, then since 2002 it’s averaged at a five year gap each time. So it’s no wonder also that there can be stylistic schisms from one to the next.

Not every musician has friends in high places in quite the way German jazz pianist and composer Julia Hülsmann does these days.

The clarinet-player, clarinet-owner or clarinet-lover in your life is going to want and need this record. The combination of a glorious sound, lyricism that is lived and (okay, obviously) breathed, contrasted with insane finger-busting at crazy speed is irresistible. There is a less-is-more lightness about the whole enterprise, and there are some ear-wormish tunes too.

Danny Elfman – the punk rocker-turned-film composer behind Batman, Spider-Man, Edward Scissorhands and The Simpsons – reports that he felt sceptical when first approached to write for the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain. Why? Simply because “they were a youth orchestra”. As Homer himself might say, “D’oh!”.

Throughout the 1990s and the first decade of this century, Ben Harper achieved global stardom, although the UK was a territory where he never achieved lift-off. By contrast, in the US, Australia and much of Europe, he’s regarded as a heavyweight (he’s won three Grammys!).