The London Jazz Festival celebrates its 20th anniversary this year and some serious jazz hitters are coming out to play.

Seb Rochford is a British drummer and member of the experimental jazz band Polar Bear. He has also drummed for the likes of Pete Doherty, David Byrne, Brian Eno and Herbie Hancock. Here he tells Music Magazine about some of his favourites.

Herbie Hancock's new project involves collaborations with a swathe of guests – mostly vocalists like Chaka Khan, James Morrison and Seal, but also more intriguing musical cross-fertilisations.

The pianist Dave Stapleton may have the name of a suburban postman but he knows how to shape a 21st-century modern-jazz unit.

The great piano trio resurgence continues in soul-jazz and lyrical soft-bop from south Wales.

If Louis Armstrong burst upon the jazz world like a star in 1923, then the trumpeter Freddie Hubbard became one of its biggest comets when he did the same in 1959. The incandescent moment came with the issue of an album, Sister Salvation, made under the leadership of the trombonist and Hubbard's fellow Indianapolitan Slide Hampton. Suddenly, here was a fully formed virtuoso, crackling with a full, brazen technique and bursting with ideas.

Jazz's highest-profile keyboardist says he is interested in projects that could be "events, not just records". The flagship night of this year's London Jazz Festival certainly lives up to that hope, as Herbie Hancock ignores recent albums and unleashes his most vibrant group for years.

Temple of Soul is a sort of American equivalent of Tackhead, featuring top session players stretching out in search of their own thang – or rather, James Brown's, Jimi Hendrix's and Herbie Hancock's thangs, judging by the jazz-funk indulgence that is Brothers in Arms.