What makes a memorable jazz and blues festival? Is it the sight of apparently respectable middle-aged men dancing themselves to a frenzy as Jack Bruce’s latest power trio thunders through Sunshine of Your Love? Is it the sound of a 79-year-old saxophone player, who long ago left home to make his name in the States, back leading a starry big band through Duke Ellington? If he wasn’t a miner’s son from Lochgelly who supports Cowdenbeath FC, you’d swear that Joe Temperley was misty-eyed. Or maybe it’s just the spectacle of a New Orleans jazz parade given a Scottish twist, a blur of noise and colour, winding its way to the Grassmarket.

Held over ten days in early August, the Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival can seem like a warm-up act for the main event, the International Festival and its unruly offspring, the Fringe. But in almost any other city, with close to 100 shows, the jazz festival would be a self-contained headliner. The festival is bigger than Brecon’s and Cheltenham’s, second only to London in November. About 22,000 tickets were sold this year, with 20-25,000 attending free events.

The festival featured the trumpet virtuosity of Roy Hargrove and such dependable party starters as Courtney Pine and Jools Holland. But Roger Spence, one of the event's two producers, says it is a different beast from, say, London’s. The audience is mainly local and while a London promoter can put on a big star and be sure he will get 3,000 people prepared to pay up to £50, Edinburgh can’t compete.

The alternative is to create a festival with one-off musical meetings that audiences can’t see elsewhere. Thus Temperley, the only non-American in Wynton Marsalis’s big band, came over with a fearsomely talented 17-year-old saxophonist from Seattle, Carl Majeau, who played with local musicians. Dick Hyman, veteran pianist and Woody Allen’s favoured music arranger played ragtime and swing, but he also performed a concert on harpsichord, crossing over into early classical music. Eric Miyashiro, a stunning lead trumpeter with the Japanese big band No Name Horses, also joined Temperley’s Ellington big band.

Spence says: “One massive artistic highlight was the Kevin Mackenzie/Loren Stillman Quartet concert, which was one of the most exciting I’ve heard in many, many years. Stillman is a musician who has been coming to Edinburgh for ten years or so from the USA and he has developed a rapport with a number of Scottish musicians.

“The way the jazz scene is at the moment, the 'industry' is failing to spot many of the most creative musicians, and Stillman is without question a major player in jazz today. Having said that, all the musicians in the group – Kevin Mackenzie, Aidan O’Donnell, and Alyn Cosker - played at an astonishing level. It was one of those concerts that will stand out as one of the great creative achievements of my life as a promoter.”

It helps that the festival features so many local musicians. The Scottish Government is keen to promote homegrown talents and the jazz line-up has proportionately many more than the international festival. This meant there were funds to create and rehearse an Edinburgh Jazz Festival Orchestra, which featured in concerts overseen by Temperley and pianist Dave Milligan.

It helps too, that as a host town, Edinburgh is an overachiever for culture, heritage and character. One of my most vivid memories this year occurred offstage. Walking up Canongate one afternoon I became aware of a dog intermittently howling. The noise rose and fell for no apparent reason. Then the dog’s owner passed and explained that it was the sound of bagpipes that set her pet off. Canongate is full of tourist shops blaring out bagpipe CDs. Happily, the sounds on stage were a lot more musical.