"A Cross-Cultural Celebration of the Music of Miles Davis," it says, in which prominent Indian musos get down and dirty with prominent ex-Davis sidemen in... well, you've read the subtitle already. And guess what? It works, by and large. Miles always had a thing for Indian music and Davis-heads will recall his expansive use of tablas and sitar on various Sixties and Seventies records.

Elixir, ECM

The Difference Engine (Rekid)

The first record I bought was...

Kind of Blue by Miles Davis. I remember hearing "So What" on the radio when I was just eight years old and my dad was driving us up to London one night in the rain. Around that time I had been getting more and more into playing around with scales and improvising on the piano, so I was just really struck by American jazz pianist Bill Evans' way with harmony.

'The team's demands for Yazoo and Benecol call to mind a six-year-old's requirements at school breaktime'

You might be hard put to explain why it is, but Britons seem to have a fervent sympathy for bumblebees. Here are a few suggestions. They're furry and appear cuddly. (They remind us of mammals.) They're obviously hard working (no scroungers they). They're as much a part of our gardens as lawns. (Or they were.) Their first appearance is an unmistakable sign of the spring. (Or it was.) Their drowsy buzzing is one of the sounds of summer. (Or it should be.) They might only be the size of your thumbnail but they are among Britain's most popular creatures.

The New Danger, GEFFEN

In 1999 what had been threatening for years actually happened: the ghost of jazz past all but obliterated the present. This wasn't surprising - the cumulative weight of a music which began at the same time as the century itself had been pressing down ever since the CD reissue boom of the late 1980s - but it was the centenary of Duke Ellington that finally tipped the scales. Tribute concerts by Wynton Marsalis at the Barbican, a special weekend at the South Bank and other festschrifts too numerous to mention all honoured the Duke, but left little room for anything else.

MARTIN HAYES/DENNIS CAHILL

Fifty years ago, a radical young trumpeter called Miles Davis met the experienced arranger Gil Evans. Their collaboration gave rise to The Birth of the Cool. Jazz (and life in general) has never been the same since.

MARK ISHAM BARBICAN LONDON

A CONTRADICTION amongst trumpet players, Lester Bowie was the most successful trumpeter of the avant-garde and at the same time the contemporary player who was most happy when digging about in the roots of jazz from the earlier parts of the century.

MARK ISHAM RONNIE SCOTT'S LONDON

WITH A new chic based on old brand names, jazz by the end of the 1980s had become self-satisfied. As the end of the 1990s approaches, it has become cocooned establishment paranoia, disguised, as are many elements in our society, as tradition.