London Jazz Festival, Various venues

Sunday’s programme opened with an afternoon showing at the Barbican of Louis, a must-see gem. The silent film fantasy is based on a real-life incident, Louis Armstrong’s boyhood arrest for firing a pistol in the air, which earned him a sentence to the Coloured Waifs’ Home. The events leading up to the incident are lost to history but for director Dan Pritzker, political corruption, bordello shenanigans and puppy love have much to answer for.

The monochrome is sharply shot and, following the Chaplin template, pathos and slapstick are finely balanced. Anthony Coleman is charming as the boy Armstrong, capturing the street-savvy trumpeter’s ebullience and sense of justice to a T: as the capacity audience filed out, Coleman was spotted, still seated in the stalls, and acknowledged the fans’ prolonged applause with a stiff bow and a shy grin.

It was the integration of live music and film that made Louis such a success. The Wynton Marsalis score closely weaves the solo piano music of 19th-century Creole composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk into a tapestry of original material and jazz classics. Concert pianist Cecile Licad unleashed the bittersweet contours of Gottschalk’s Chopinesque compositions, while an on-the-money nonet, led by trombonist Wycliffe Gordon, swung hard and dug deep, driven by drummer Herlin Riley’s imperious, hard-boiled shuffles. At times, the score switched from one style to the other, following the film to the slightest gesture. At others, it was rhythmically at odds, the ragtime jangle of Licad’s piano or the moan of Jellyroll horns giving a surreal undertow to streetlife and bawdy dance alike.

The romantic undertow of early American music surfaced in Joey Calderazzo’s trio gig at Ronnie Scott’s later the same evening. The pianist reconstructed the American songbook into music of hard-swinging substance, loading his long set with florid lines, accelerating tempos and a wayward left hand. Bittersweet emotion found its fullest expression on a solo centrepiece themed on love and grief. “La Valse Kendall”, written for his wife, combined affectionate swirls with romantic cadences, while “Hope”, written for the late saxophonist Michael Brecker, oozed emotional ambiguity.

On Wednesday, at Shoreditch club XOYO, the Robert Glasper Experiment delivered a long hip-hop-infused jam whose rhythmic panache and fiendish breaks were steeped in the steamier side of the Armstrong legacy. Like the romantic Calderazzo, pianist Glasper pulls popular material out of shape but here the emphasis is on rhythm and texture rather than sequence and song.

Glasper’s set opened with Derrick Hodge delivering the bass riff from “A Love Supreme” and closed with a J Dilla medley and tribute. Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and Herbie Hancock’s “Butterfly” crystallised out of layered mists of electronica supported by spacey, bone-crunching bass while single-note piano ricocheted over drummer Mark Colenburg’s jittery beats at awesome speed. As Glasper’s Rhodes resonated, the pulse shimmered into abstraction, before firming up for the sprinkling of trenchant solos. Casey Benjamin on sax and spooky vocoder was a double highlight. Unfortunately, the climactic moments and fine details of this sharply focused gig were lost by a muddy PA mix. Both the crammed-in audience and Robert Glasper deserved better.

www.londonjazzfestival.org.uk