Its lively outdoor stage attracts sizeable crowds to soak up sunshine, beer and free music from up-and-coming players, but Cheltenham’s admirable commitment to young musicians is its most noticeable characteristic. Indoors, the Gloucestershire Youth Jazz Orchestra played Tim Richards’s Shamanism Suite with great verve and confidence. Their teenage soloists held their own against guests from Trinity College of Music, whose big band shared the programme, performing John Dankworth’s Zodiac Variations. This was every bit as slick as Dankworth’s own version, with the altoist Lucas Dodd making the most of his brief solo appearances in the role of Britain’s most famous jazz knight.

The Jerwood sponsorship scheme has now created its own young Cheltenham all-stars, who appeared with the great American drummer Jack DeJohnette. The varied compositions by several of the eight band members showed the range of talent that the programme has fostered. The clarinettist Shabaka Hutchings directed a free improvisation using hand gestures. This was a thoroughly entertaining process, with the audience able to see the “score” developing before its eyes. By contrast Nathaniel Facey’s tribute to Eric Dolphy was a dazzlingly accomplished piece of through-composition, using the entire tonal palette of the band, with the pianist Tom Cawley consistently producing surprising, inventive solos.

Gremlins in the Everyman Theatre caused a power cut on Saturday, cancelling two events, but the pianist Nikki Yeoh’s enthralling new commission for the saxophonist John Surman was at least partly aired on Sunday. Artist-in-residence Dave Liebman was less fortunate, as his BBC Big Band collaboration remained unheard, but the demonic conviction of his small group playing packed the energy from two concerts into one.

No gremlins disrupted the polished set by the American trumpeter Dave Douglas, or the intense exploration of gospel by the clarinettist Don Byron and the exotic singer D. K. Dyson. But there were gremlins aplenty for the headliner Hugh Masekela, whose group had been stranded in South Africa. He recruited four local stand-ins, and in a powerful set, featuring Masekela’s supple flugelhorn, fiery vocals and intense cowbell rhythms, we were none the wiser until he told us at the end that they had only met that afternoon. Their rousing encore had the audience on its feet to jazz that was at its best for being completely spontaneous.

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