As if on cue, a Dixieland band struck up When the Saints Go Marching In as passengers disembarked at the airport. In a city that is reeling from the recession — as every taxi driver reminds you — the festival banished memories of the painful demise of the Celtic Tiger.

Some of the most audacious music was to be found in Kurt Elling’s late-night date in the ornate Victorian setting of the Everyman Palace Theatre. If the air-conditioning system seemed to be of Victorian vintage too, the American singer brought his distinctive brand of cool to a programme that cleverly juggled Beat lyricism with more conventional ballads from his excellent new album, Dedicated to You, a celebration of the Sixties encounter between John Coltrane and the velvet-voiced Johnny Hartman.

Elling’s instrumental-based approach can sometimes be overly self-conscious — on a steamy evening he risked alienating those listeners who preferred the more romantic Coltrane-Hartman numbers to his spikier, improvisational forays. But with the pianist Laurence Hobgood nudging the rhythm section along, and that cultured veteran Ernie Watts making a guest appearance in the Coltrane role, the performance turned the venue into an intimate club. All or Nothing At All put a cerebral spin on Sinatra’s legacy; Nature Boy became an existentialist journey, while Elling turned on the wry humour with a stream-of-consciousness rap, punctuated with Hobgood’s blues licks, about trying to keep up with the party crowd.

The atmosphere was much more raucous the night before when the Sun Ra Arkestra rampaged through its increasingly predictable repertoire of cacophonous antics. The surreal cosmic imagery was hard to take when the bandleader was still alive; it now seems hopelessly dated, although I have to concede that the young audience lapped it all up with hoots of ironic laughter. Very mysterious, and very postmodern.

There was rather more substance to the support set from Ethan Iverson’s group, the Bad Plus, a cult American outfit that manages to find common ground between Nirvana , Milton Babbitt and the post-Ornette avant-garde. Many of the power trio workouts are bombastic and repetitive, but the best of the pieces cleverly adapt jazz to a language that the Cobain generation can recognise.

The Jamaican pianist Monty Alexander — a much more mellifluous player than Iverson — supplied his own very different brand of cross-cultural experiments in a buoyant if overly rhapsodic performance that blended the spirit of the vintage Nat Cole Trio with ska and Bob Marley’s No Woman No Cry.

The American guitarist Al Di Meola took the mix-and-match approach a step farther in a multinational band that included the accordion player Fausto Beccalossi. Fans of that Seventies supergroup Return to Forever were out in force, naturally, but Di Meola’s performance was slightly more restrained than in the heyday of gee-whiz fusion.

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