The fiddler in the shed and his army of bright-eyed Folk monsters

It's that time of year. The Folk Ensemble will run riot. All 50 of them.

I'm sitting with a university lecturer in deepest Smethwick. If truth be be told, I'm not here for his academic chops. He's a muso, and a bloody brilliant one at that. We're at the bottom of his garden, drinking coffee. In a shed; brick-built, but still a shed. But instead of bamboo canes, rakes, spaces and shears cluttering the floor, you step around guitars and fiddles. There's posters and a couple of really tasty speakers hanging off the walls, hooked up to quite a large Mac.

You've guessed by now. This is actually a studio. It belongs to the Urban Folk Quartet's Joe Broughton. This is his workplace.

So where are we? A conversation with Jazz enablers and new generation players.

OK, go ahead - you define Jazz for me, because I don't know where to begin. 

Defined or not, it’s one of those areas marked by love for musicianship, experimentation, willfulness, and avoidance of genre definition. Fashionable? Hell, no, but that’s never a bad thing. And, from it, a steady flow of new genres seems to emerge – also never a bad thing.

It's not surprising that 50s Jazz was so tightly bound up with 50s existentialism: both are centred on the individual and the moment. And like too many other music areas, Jazz is a place where pigeonholing, snobbery and tribalism can seriously taint the music-making process.

And it seems to be heavily freighted with assumptions and contradictions. At one end of the spectrum, it's seen as safe, just arty and just nicely experimental enough for countless cosy festivals each year. It's also a cute label for record companies to bolt on to their offerings to give them more credibility.. At the other end, it's full of explosive, passionate and uncompromising music that simply isn't going to wait for you to catch up.