To a big slice of the audience, jazz still means diddly-oo-ba-reebop and a cymbal beat that goes ding-ding-aling - but not to Europe's big festival programmers. May's Cheltenham international jazz festival regularly commissions ventures that break moulds, but it still keeps the core constituency happy.
Unorthodox commissions this year included trumpeter Gerard Presencer's music inspired by author Jim Crace's short stories, and bassist Arnie Somogyi's return to his ancestry in the Jerwood Rising Stars programme, with a mixed British and Hungarian band playing a vivid east Europeanised folk-bop.
This year's artist in residence was the formidable UK pianist/composer John Taylor. His Sunday performance with a drummerless chamber quartet featuring the American violinist Mark Feldman, guitarist John Abercrombie and UK bassist Chris Laurence visited oo-ba-reebop hardly at all. But Feldman slashed his way through the generally muted mood on Abercrombie's Excuse My Shoes, and became Gypsy-inspired on the music from Taylor's Ambleside Days. British guitarist David Okumu also played a fine Sunday set, inventively propelled by former Archie Shepp/Don Cherry bassist Cameron Brown and the vivacious playing of Danish percussionist Benita Haastrup (randomly renamed "Hafstra" in the programme).
The sharp-end American bass/drums duo of New York downtowners Drew Gress and Tom Rainey were mixed into another cocktail on Monday, playing the music of the British pianist Liam Noble, with Phil Robson on guitar. Hasty rehearsal for highly wrought music makes for tentative moments but the percussively algebraic finale Jitters brought inventive collective jittering of a clarity, focus and density that sounded like the music of regular partners. So did the collaboration between a full-on British big band and the hot Brazilian core led by Hermeto Pascoal. Pascoal delivered more abrasively harmonised music than the playful melody for which he is also loved, but as usual he brought the audience in as an impromptu choir, played tea-kettles and bicycle pumps, and had the band clacking coconut shells and honking like donkeys in the storming finale. It came close to the exuberance of Joe Zawinul's fiery Syndicate the previous night - and had the edge for wit, if not for breath-robbing intensity.
