Jazz-funk organ trio Wild Card have been slowly building a reputation for smoking funk tunes and grooves you could lose a pantechnicon in for some years now. Led by French guitarist Clément Régert, with organist Andy Noble and drummer Sophie Alloway, they perform with quite a range of guests, both instrumentalists and singers, which keeps the atmosphere of their repertoire fresh and varied. Their rise to prominence has accelerated recently with the release of their third album, Organic Riot, which has been garnering rave reviews internationally.

It's day five of the EFG London Jazz Festival, and Snarky Puppy's show at the Roundhouse has sold out weeks in advance. And, as the crowd sings the gorgeous main theme of “Thing of Gold” in perfect unison, one of the reasons for the band's huge success becomes apparent. Yes, there's brilliant musicianship, spirited improv, blazing energy and the kind of impressively vast textures that only a band this size can achieve. But there's something else, which trumps all of these things. There's melody.

Michael League is the Grammy Award-winning bassist, composer, producer and bandleader with NYC-based jazz-funk-fusion band Snarky Puppy. Formed in Denton, Texas, in 2004, Snarky Puppy is comprised of a collective of over 30 musicians. In addition to touring and recording, the band is committed to music education, holding over 100 clinics, workshops, and masterclasses in the US, Canada, the UK, France, the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium.

The swamp, all grime and alligators, is not somewhere most jazz or rock fans will expect to spend much time, a soggy Glastonbury aside, and it’s a puzzling title for a work of reflective delicacy and sympathetic instrumental colouring. Partisans have now been playing together for 18 years, and this album, their fifth (a leisurely work-rate indicative mainly of how busy the players are elsewhere) is a sensitive tonal portrait and quiet trove of electronic loveliness.

There are all sorts of companies and shows out there that claim to “rock” the ballet, or otherwise shake up, take down or reinvent an art form that, they imply, is (breathe it softly, the dirty word) elitist, or at least irrelevant. Few, I’d imagine, perform this operation with anything like the skill and intelligence of Dada Masilo, whose 2010 version of Swan Lake opened the lively short smorgasbord season that Sadler’s Wells are calling their Sampled festival. 

The Eventim (Hammersmith) Apollo, where Pat Metheny’s Unity Group last night gave a spellbinding, if sometimes baffling, performance, has hosted a goodly range of gigs in its time. Few of these can have offered such diversity within a single evening. Piece after piece left last night’s audience whooping with exhilaration, though Metheny’s fondness for mechanical innovation briefly threatened the audience’s otherwise adoring reception.

It's hard to countenance sometimes that there was an era where Marc Almond could have been a bona fide, chart-smashing pop star. His ability to parlay the archest of high camp and the most grotesque of low life into something digestible by genuine mass culture was, from the very beginning, quite uncanny.

He looks the part: straggly, desert hair and haunted fizzog. He sounds the part: opening dry rhythmic strumming over unchorded strings; acrobatic trills; percussive attack. Flanked on the left by two singers, Kiki Cortinas and Simón Román, and a shadowy dancer, Paloma Fantova, and on the right by second guitarist El Cristi and percussionst Israel Suárez, this flamenco stalwart decked out the Sadler’s Wells stage with the requisite musical equipment.

At the beginning of last night's show, Herbie Hancock looked like he was going to perform with the dignity and serenity befitting a 72-year-old with some 50 years playing experience. The improvisation that launched from a base of Wayne Shorter's “Footprints” was elegant, charming, tasteful and often very beautiful. The synthetic instrumental loops that he triggered via a couple of iPads mounted on his grand piano as backing were unobtrusive to begin with and had a delightfully loose groove.

Herbie Hancock has never stood still. He hit the ground running, joining Miles Davis's second great quintet on piano in 1963 at the age of just 23, and from that moment on demonstrated a Stakhanovite work ethic and appetite for the new which saw him on the crest of wave after wave of revolutionary music.