Jamie Cullum's first album for Island may be his best. It certainly goes beyond his retro-jazz comfort zone, with piercing electric organ and electric piano lending a vibrant, visceral edge to several songs.

1. Which US state has the highest population of Amish?

Legally Blonde star Sheridan Smith is set to play Hedda Gabler in a London stage production of Henrik Ibsen's seminal work.

Lazarus and the Plane Crash is a project fronted by Joe Coles of defunct berserkers The Guillotines and Stephen Coates, aka the Real Tuesday Weld aka The Clerkenwell Kid.

Pianist Butterworth is a right-hand man with a cerebral Bill Evans meets Lennie Tristano style that in the context of the sometimes brash piano-trio sector proves winning.

Three classical premieres followed by a jazz bash for Britain’s most prolific crossover-composer: thus does the Nash Ensemble celebrate the 75th birthday of one of its most successful sons. Where would British music have been without the Nash? Artistically poorer, for since its foundation in 1964, this world-beating ensemble has commissioned 160 new works, including major ones by Elliot Carter, Harrison Birtwistle, Mark-Anthony Turnage, plus a catalogue of other now-prominent composers.

As WB Yeats wrote in a poem not included here (though several of his gems appear), "How but in custom and in ceremony/ Are innocence and beauty born?"

Generous in scope and attitude, Morris Dickstein's survey of the cultural eruption produced by the Great Depression reveals how the same themes recurred across the arts.

The singer and actress Kathryn Grayson was a resident soprano at MGM from 1940 until the early Fifties, her films including the acclaimed versions of Show Boat and Kiss Me, Kate. She was particularly favoured by producer Joe Pasternak, who had moved from Universal, where he had brilliantly handled the career of Deanna Durbin. Grayson's operatic background and training appealed to the producer, who liked to mix classics with popular songs in his musicals.

That wicked trickster Hugo Williams queers his reviewer's pitch in "West End Twilight". The poem insolently mocks every cliché about his quasi-autobiographical verse and its habitual use of his matinée-idol actor father, Hugh: "as the lives of father and son/ loom clear, perception of the past is altered..." etcetera.