The London Jazz Festival thrives on mining new seams of interest. This year it staged nearly 200 events in more than 40 venues, attracting an audience as diverse as the people on a London street. On a late post-gig Tube journey home, I saw a teacher, the file under his arm marked “Jazz Festival Trip”, animatedly counting heads as his charges were met by parents along the route.

This year, the reopened Royal Festival Hall did more than boost audience figures. With a packed programme of free concerts and talks, it gave the festival a much-needed focal point in a city where gigs can be miles apart and even the biggest concert has to fight for pole position on the capital’s crowded musical calendar. In one evening, I followed a sublime bill of chamber jazz in the art deco decorum of the Wigmore Hall with a trip to a converted railway arch in Shoreditch for an uplifting set of jazz/hip-hop at Cargo. Generations, rhythms and rhyme fused triumphantly as the poetic politics of the human beatbox Napoleon Maddox met the pure-toned squeaks of the veteran saxophonist Oliver Lake and the pumping bass and drum team of Joe Fonda and Hamid Drake.