Appalled by the synthetic-sounding CDs available, bassist and new dad Michael Janisch decided to create his own: a now five-disc selection of "slow and relaxing" jazz lullabies performed on real instruments by real musicians to soothe and educate wombers to pre-schoolers.

When he played Falstaff at the Globe, and the weather turned nasty, Roger Allam sidestepped nimbly into a bit of King Lear (“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks…you cataracts and hurricanoes, spout”).

Kings Place, London

Louis Armstrong singing spiritual-jazz anthem "The Creator Has a Masterplan" (and sounding great) is one of the more bizarre experiences on this neat compendium of black consciousness from the vaults of Bob Thiele's Flying Dutchman label.

Propeller Arts is an all-male-troupe, which is unusual in itself when gender-blind casting in Shakespeare is on the rise and more women are taking leading male roles.

'Garfield's a cool cat. He'd play the saxophone really well...'

Whoever came up with the Top 10 list of celebrities reading sections of 50 Shades of Grey REALLY knows what makes the internet tick. It's gold-dust. (So thank you, Flavourwire's Emily Temple.)

YolanDa Brown won two Mobo jazz awards and topped the charts. Yet, she tells Emily Jupp, music still has to compete with racing-cars and a PhD

The Playhouse needed to do something special to match last Christmas’s feelgood revival of Annie. But Ian Brown, making a speedy return as director to the house he left just this year after more than a decade at its artistic helm, comes within a mole’s whisker of achieving that formidable goal.

No regrets as Scott's strange sounds prove addictive

The young giants who gathered round Charlie Parker to reconfigure jazz in 1940s New York are nearly all gone.

Anyone still ready to dismiss Hot Chip as geeks or middle-class ironists would be disabused of that notion as soon as the south London five-piece appear.

From within the death camp, a picaresque story of redemptive love

With a career lasting the best part of 70 years, the trombonist Eddie Bert was part of the backbone of jazz. He was a fat-toned and imaginative soloist with a cosmopolitan style who worked with more bands and made more recordings than did any other jazz musician in New York.