Sholto Byrnes: Talking Jazz

There's a temptation, when looking at the programme for any jazz festival, to search instantly for the really big names. And by the big names we tend to mean the Americans. Well, they will be coming to the London Jazz Festival. Tomorrow, on the second night, the fashionable deconstructionists of the traditional piano trio, The Bad Plus, will be at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the South Bank, followed on Sunday by Archie Shepp, a leading figure of the Sixties avant-garde (so avant-garde that Philip Larkin once described his music as sounding like "'Flight of the Bumble Bee' scored for bagpipes and concrete mixer"). Branford Marsalis, Harry Connick Jnr and McCoy Tyner - they'll all be here too.

But these names stand alongside, not above, the other performers drawn mainly from Europe but also from varying corners of Africa and Asia. As Roger Wright, controller of Radio 3, which sponsors the festival, says: "Jazz increasingly resembles an extended family of musical styles rather than a single genre." This year's festival really does represent that extended family, with a strong sense that no sibling should be elevated to a position of lording it over the others, nor that distant cousins from the further shores of jazz should not be made welcome. That this should feel right, and "right" is exactly the word that rings from this year's programme, is made possible by the conviction that European jazz's time has come. In Britain, a new generation of musicians too young to have been scarred by the failure of the previous jazz revival in the 1980s has been emerging, and they are now maturing into confident, purposeful players with no desire to look for inspiration across the Atlantic nor any sense that they would suffer by comparison.

Their work convinces precisely because although it may draw to varying extents on the tradition - which is to say nothing more than that it is recognisably still jazz - it speaks authentically of a British experience. This is what it means, their music says, to be a jazz musician who has grown up as a black man in south London, as a white man in Edinburgh, or as an Asian woman in Sussex.

European jazz is riding the same wave, albeit with its own localised craft. It says something for the shared confidence in the state of jazz across Europe that the big act opening the festival at the Wigmore Hall tonight is the Tord Gustavsen Trio from Norway.

If established American musicians feel sore that they're not getting the work they expect from such an event, (I've heard of one player who castigated European promoters for failing in what he perceived as their "duty" to provide him and his ilk with regular work), perhaps there is an unusual lesson. It might be time for them to start listening to us, rather than the other way around; and, dare one suggest, learning too.