The Great Escape, Brighton’s answer to Texas’s South-by-Southwest festival, has grown at an alarming rate in its six-year existence.

Jazz has a lot of people in her life who seem eager to big her up, which is handy because there are several reasons why she might need a boost. The very least of them curiously is Jazz's size, the result of an unspecified form of dwarfism.

The ska form was conceived by Brevett and his peers in the run-up to Jamaican independence

The beat of the Irish diaspora, via King's Cross

Do you remember lounge? No matter if you don't, for it wasn't much good: cocktails and crooners, mainly.

Jeb Loy Nichols's work has secured critical acclaim but not commercial success, a frustrating equation reflected in his frequent switches of label.

The prolific recording career of Hal McKusick escaped the notice of most jazz listeners, yet the people who worked for him in the studios included such eminent men as Gil Evans, George Russell, Al Cohn, Jimmy Giuffre, Ernie Wilkins and Bill Evans. Although he was a musical revolutionary and composer in the manner of Dave Brubeck or Gil Evans, McKusick never made it to the top, although he remained in the middle for an extraordinary number of years.

“We knew we’d get you with that one,” claims Chick Corea after sustained applause for “Eleanor Rigby”, a track that’s been covered over 140 times by such luminaries as Shirley Bassey, Ray Charles and Ethel the Frog.

Radiohead's live drummer and Adele's pianist are jazz stars. They tell Nick Hasted how go-to players are restoring the genre's links to the mainstream

Historic reunion of the piano and vibes duo-masters starts unpromisingly on a hit-you-over-the-head-with-a-mallet version of "Eleanor Rigby", but recovers with gorgeous treatments of Weill's "My Ship" and Jobim's "Once I Loved".

After the charming acoustic set Chamber Music Society, and just-pipping Bieber to a Grammy for Best New Artist, bassist, singer and composer Spalding tries to breathe new life into the dead form of smooth jazz-fusion.

In a week replete with intriguing cross-pollinations of style and sound, this may be both the most deliberate, yet the loosest-sounding.

Red Holloway, a tenor saxophone player who had a tone as big as the side of a house, made his name in jazz, but more quietly – or musically, more loudly – worked for John Mayall and a variety of rhythm'n'blues stars. "I enjoyed playing with Mayall," Holloway said. "He's a very good self-taught entertainer and I admire that. It takes an awful lot of nerve and perseverance to become successful like he did... We had a good working relationship."

Blue Notes