When a musical jeweller with an imagination of remarkable aural refinement meets a jazz orchestra which combines playing of super-fine precision and warmth with a total commitment to the music’s singular ebb and flow, remarkable things can happen.

If nothing else, you couldn’t accuse Greta Van Fleet of short-changing fans when it came to costumes or pyro. It felt like every few minutes the Michigan throwback rockers frontman Josh Kiszka was disappearing offstage, only to reappear in a variety of jumpsuits or robes, while roasting flames regularly shot up from behind the four piece.

Abigail Lapell is a singer feted and given awards in her homeland of Canada, but who has yet to reach far outside it. Folk is her metier but only insofar as it’s Joni Mitchell’s.

Five albums into her career, inspired by COVID lockdown-induced insomnia, she gives us a short set of lullabies from around the world, alongside a sole new song of her own. It is a hazily gentle and often lovely thing.

Start with the biggest gig of this year’s EFG London Jazz Festival: Angélique Kidjo’s Royal Albert Hall show definitely stays in the mind. Part of the story is the earth-shaking power and resonance of the voice of the "Queen of African music" which transforms the Royal Albert Hall magically into an intimate space.

Well, wow. Just wow. At a time when there are fewer and fewer people I’m desperate to see live and so many of them are then disappointing, the celebration by Dave Stewart and friends of the Eurythmics catalogue, 40 years – 40 years! – after  “Sweet Dreams Are Made of This” was thrilling. An exhilarating two hours of high-level musicianship brilliantly produced.

Back to Moon Beach is a collection of new, reworked and covered songs that feels like a gift from Kurt Vile for his fans to dissect. He jokingly refers to the EP, which is just under an hour long, as “a KV comp”, an appropriate description given the varied history of the tracks.

It’s not long before the first single “Another Good Year for the Roses” is momentarily forgotten in favour of Vile’s take on Bob Dylan’s Christmas song “It Must Be Santa”, which in turn is left behind for the reworked version of his 2022 track “Cool Water”.

High Tide were one of many late Sixties and early Seventies British bands unearthed in the early Eighties by record collectors digging into what came after psychedelia. The bands didn’t have similar musical styles but were united by their obscurity and having sold barely any copies of their albums. All were largely forgotten until their rediscovery. Ben, Gracious!, Pussy, Red Dirt, T2, more. Who were these bands? Who were High Tide?

This UK premiere of the award-winning, Dublin-born vocalist and composer Christine Tobin’s latest project, Returning Weather, presented an otherworldly ode to finding home – casting multiple perspectives on our yearning for connection and human warmth.

Andrew Eldritch, vocalist and convent leader of the Sisters of Mercy, is a famously obtuse character. This may have made him seem somewhat mysterious over the years, but it has also meant that he has missed a few open goals too.

I usually find it useful to listen to the music before I tackle the often bile-inducing press release that generally taints each launch. Admittedly, it's a hard job to sell music without veering into hyperbole and very few achieve it. Why am I telling you this? Because, if I had have read the accompanying notes, rather than thinking "this is very good but it does sound like background music", I would have known it was, in actual fact, background music.