Everything But The Girl: Eden, Love Not Money, Baby, The Stars Shine Bright, Idlewild

Jasper Rees

My Bloody Valentine: Isn’t Anything, Loveless, EPs 1988-1991

Kieron Tyler

Norah Jones is back. New haircut, new sound, new producer. The first of these, while very nice, needn't concern us too much. The second, meanwhile, is largely a result of the presence of the third, the ubiquitous Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton, who is working so hard these days I'm starting to suspect there might actually be two of him: Danger and Mouse. 

This has to be the only music festival I've ever been to where two vacuum cleaners were on standby in case the star performer conked out. But that's what happens when your star performer is a player piano - they seem to run on Hoover tubes. With 11 concerts and one film in two days, this celebration of American maverick Conlon Nancarrow was London's alternative marathon. One that was no less eccentric, exhausting or adrenalin-generating (though much less running-based).

It began with a warning. Opening the fourth Tallinn Music Week, Estonia’s President Toomas Hendrik Ilves cautioned, “In a free society, it’s risk-free. In an un-free society, it’s not risk-free. It’s not all fun.” From behind a hotel conference room lectern, he then began rolling a video of Russia’s Pussy Riot being arrested in Moscow a few days earlier. Not everyone can make their point, make their music, choose how they want to get it across.

“I guess it's jazz, but it's not what jazz was... if you have to call it something... " Esbjörn Svensson was the leader, pianist and main composer of e.s.t. and at the time of his death in a scuba-diving accident on 14 June, 2008, it would seem the band had the world at its feet.

This fourth album from Scandinavian/British jazz trio Phronesis is the follow-up to their much-lauded 2010 release Alive, chosen as 'Jazz Album of the Year' by both Jazzwise and MOJO magazines. It's also the first in which all three of its members – Danish bassist Jasper Høiby, British pianist Ivo Neame and Swedish drummer Anton Eger – contribute to the writing and arranging duties. And it's all the richer for it.

Welcome to theartsdesk's first radio show with Peter Culshaw and Joe Muggs, recorded with the extremely able help of Brendon Harding at Red Bull Studio London.

Ambrose Akinmusire is the new jazz sensation, the messiah of the post-bop trumpet. With his hyper-talented and youthful quintet, the 29-year-old Californian delivered a set in Bristol that rang all the changes from the soft and lyrical to high-energy heat.