Spot the location. This is Ian Shaw performing at the Oxford Union , (photo credit: Barker Evans) where so many of our politicians learnt their…er….craft, with Janette Mason at last year’s (inaugural) Oxford Jazz Festival.

Apparently the word inaugural could lead to me getting my head bitten off for inaccuracy. There was another, one-off Oxford Jazz Festival a few years ago. Whatever. The current team are doing well, and Oxford is already starting to look like an early-festival-season fixture.

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This year the Festival organizers have found some other amazing locations. On Sunday 4th April you can hear Adam Waldmann’s Kairos Quartet playing in the Convocation Room of the Bodleian Library in Catte Street, the same room where the English Parliament met in the Civil War. Pre-concert drinks in the Divinity Room, and a tour of the Duke Humphrey Rooms, no less.

The newly refurbished Ashmolean Museum dining room is proving a VERY popular location: One of the two gigs there has sold out already, and there are only a few left for the other.

Stand-out gigs are Dave O’Higgins on the Friday 2nd at 8pm, and Liane Carroll (try some sound clips) on Saturday 3rd, both at the North Wall Arts Centre in Summertown. Liane is state-of-the-art, and one of the wonders of the world, so I expect a few pushy North Oxford mums to allow their three year-olds time off from their nuclear physics and Thucydides projects and bring them to this gig.

I would also be curious to hear the always-on-fire Clark Tracey occupying the impeccable Matt Home’s drum chair in the Nigel Price Hammond Organ Trio at Joe’s Bar and Grill on Sunday 4th at 6pm (that’s a free gig).

Looking for a refuge from the smoke over Easter weekend? Simple. Just go to Marble Arch and hail yourself one of THESE