Elliott Carter as cheer leader? The 91-year-old composer looked on last Tuesday as his youthful indiscretion enjoyed a rare action replay. His 1944 Holiday Overture was a cheer all right, a last hurrah for the "new deal", the new aesthetic of Aaron Copland, whose "simple gifts" had so eloquently restored pride in America's musical heritage. But, more than that, it was a celebration. Paris, city of Nadia Boulanger, mentor to both composers, had been liberated and Carter was going to kick some ass. Holiday Overture is Walton's Portsmouth Point with rim-shots. Sassy and syncopated. There's a fugue - a mark of respect, perhaps, for Boulanger's quiet classicism - but the pay-off is pure Charles Ives with each of Carter's themes jostling for pride of place in the victory parade. It sounded like something the Dallas Symphony might have left behind, except that Oliver Knussen and the BBC Symphony played it with the kind of muscle and true grit that, dare I say it, was more American than the Americans.

With just a guitar, a fiddle and the instrument of silence, Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill create a fragile magic, says a bewitched Colin Harper

Back home in Georgia, Giya Kancheli used to think big. Now based in Germany, he spreads his music more thinly, but covers much the same spiritual ground. By Robert Cowan

In 1941, Gertrude Lawrence and Danny Kaye stunned Broadway with Weill and Gershwin's groundbreaking 'Lady in the Dark'. Finally, says, David Benedict, it's arrived in London

John Scofield has gone quiet. He's swapped his electric jazz guitar for a nylon-stringed acoustic. With mellow, Gil-ish results. By Phil Johnson

Barry Adamson Oedipus Schmoedipus Mute CD STUMM 134

It'll probably grow on me over time, but for the moment this sounds like the most turgid offering yet from the Atlanta rockers. On their day, they're the best live band in the world, but here the layers of guitar and keyboards seem too densely packed to achieve lift-off, leaving several tracks straining to rise above their riffs.

From Living Colour to 'Mistaken Identity', Vernon Reid just wants to rock. By Phil Johnson

For decades, jazz and classical music have eyed each other, yearning for a liaison neither dares initiate. Composers long for the articulacy and freedom jazz enjoys, jazzers want the status, if not the respectability, bestowed on composition. Mark-Anthony Turnage spent time studying with Gunther Schuller, who played with Miles Davis in the Fifties and came closer than most to fusing composition and jazz, a fusion that he labelled "Third Stream". Like Schuller, Turnage spent his teenage years adoring jazz, and now uses the orchestra with the exuberance of the best jazz orchestrators. Yet his music doesn't sound like jazz. Nor should it, unless he wants it to.

Who ever said listening should be easy? Not Mark-Anthony Turnage, whose latest piece injects themes of drug abuse and urban angst into a high-octane cocktail of jazz and classical styles

Jazzmen, take heart. A British surgeon has set out to cure trumpeter's lip, the secret curse of musicians which may have prematurely ended the top-class performances of many legendary jazz figures, including Louis Armstrong.

Woody Allen and his New Orleans Jazz Band will be playing a concert at the Royal Festival Hall on London's South Bank tonight.

'Barker and Soloff teed off each other and drove for the upper reaches'

"Tonight we re-orchestrate!" may not have the same ring as "tonight we improvise!" but Mike Gibbs's interpretations of scores by Charles Ives, Mark-Anthony Turnage and Oliver Knussen, together with a few pieces from his own book, overflowed with quite wonderful music. Stemming originally from a 1994 commission by Birmingham Jazz, when Gibbs was asked to provide a jazz evening for a weekend devoted to Knussen and Turnage, and pairing the Zimbabwean composer with Manchester's Creative Jazz Orchestra, this Contemporary Music Network tour date triumphantly married the often strange bedfellows of the jazz and contemporary classical worlds. The scores were performed faithfully, after a fashion, yet the band swung like the clappers, and windows of improvisation were opened often enough to give the soloists something to really shout about.