Has there ever been a weirder era in pop than the late 50s when the UK's teenagers decided that rock music was but a passing fad and the real excitement lay in listening to Acker Bilk? We like to think of British youth culture as intuitive and pace-setting, the thing that gave the world teddy boys and new romantics ...

If Tom Stoppard and Almost Free Theatre could play a 15-minute Hamlet to cut out the prevarications and welcome the masses in the 1970s, we can do the same for jazz in 2008. So here's how to translate jazzspeak, follow the plot, and nod in the right places. First, you need a storyline, which goes roughly like this: In ...

Every now and then, every national or local film theatre reckons it's time for another season of "Jazz and the Movies". So all the over-cooked chestnuts come out of the fire again: we'll have Clint Eastwood's Bird; Nat King Cole playing WC Handy in St Louis Blues; Sinatra as Frankie Machine in The Man With the Golden ...

Like Ronnie Scott in England, Martial Solal in France and Friedrich Gulder in Austria, the Swedish saxophonist Arne "Dompan" Domnérus, who has died aged 83, was one of a first wave of European musicians authoritatively exploring the sophisticated idiom of bebop, and his assured performances at the Paris jazz festival of 1949 did much to put Swedish ...