"What a great festival." That's the unanimous verdict of a cheery group of 50 or so News Shopper readers back from Belgium.

They've been thrilling to the musical delights on hand at the Django Reinhardt Festival at the village of Liberchies, the place of the great guitarist's birth in 1910.

This month has seen the anniversary of Django's death May 16, 1953 and the passion for his gypsy swing jazz continues unabated. A long-established French resident by the late 1930s, he became the first non-American international jazz star.

Today, at any of the myriad festivals in his name, you'll find scores of young acoustic guitarists teenagers and younger totally addicted to that warm and exhilarating musical tradition.

As for our band of happy returning fans, they're already getting ready for next year's Django trip and for their next festival visit, to Scarborough in September for the more contemporary jazz sounds of British musicians like Norma Winstone, Tony Kofi, Alan Barnes and more.

For details of these all-in trips, contact me at musicmatters@talk21.com and I'll pass your details to the organisers.