Watching the Panamanian pianist Danilo Perez working with World in Motion, the Guildhall School of Music & Drama outreach big band, was a heartwarming experience. The players, aged from 8 to 18, were being mentored by one of the most rhythmic players in jazz, and their vibrant programme showed how well they had grasped Perez’s tenet that the drum is central to jazz.

There was more proof of this in two further outstanding sets from the London Jazz Festival. First, the veteran Paris-based drummer Aldo Romano created dramatic dynamics and textures at LSO St Luke’s in Central London in the long-established trio fronted by the saxophonist Louis Sclavis. Together with the bassist Henri Texier, Romano’s rhythmic backdrop prompted some of the most fiendishly accomplished clarinet and soprano saxophone playing to be heard in London this year, but also fitted brilliantly with the projected photographs of Guy Le Querrec that documented the trio’s adventures in Africa.

Snarling note clusters from the bass clarinet, with snare drum tattoos and strummed bass, accompanied pictures that carried a powerful political punch in Texier’s composition Surreal Politik. The innocence of African childhood was caught in Sclavis’s lyrical theme Three Children, while photographs and music gave a magical evocation of desert survival in Texier’s Berbere. Behind it all the beat of the drum caught the levity of a village celebration or the thunder of wildlife on the plains.

Perhaps because of a complete lack of rhythmic tension, the Finnish harpist Iro Haarla did not so much warm up audience at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the South Bank for the drummer Manu Katche as deep-freeze them with a set of cheerless melancholy. Even her brilliant Norwegian trumpeter Mathias Eick failed to lift the spirits until he returned with Katche’s quintet. Then Eick and the British pianist Jason Rebello produced brisk solos of subtlety and bravura, underpinned by the fluent rhythms of Katche himself in one of the Festival’s most absorbing sets so far.

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