Ebullient and hugely talented jazzwomen from many grooving points in the world were at the cosmopolitan heart of this year’s London Jazz Festival.

From Reem Kelani’s Palestinian words and the township singing of South African Sibongile Khumalo, all the way to the young English saxophonist Trish Clowes, the powerful chiming hands of pianist Zoe Rahman and Laura Jurd’s trumpet brilliance, women’s sounds burst out from a host of London venues.

Listening to the trumpeter of British/Bahraini roots Yazz Ahmed at Ray’s Jazz, with her bending and softly-focussed notes forged from Arabic scales and rhythms, sonically describing her experience in the Whispering Gallery of London’s St Paul’s Cathedral, you heard a strangely unified and unpredictable coalescence of cultures which is the very cause of jazz.

Then there was the Santiago-born young Chilean tenor saxophonist Melissa Aldana at Soho’s Pizza Express with her Crash Trio. Her impish high-register phrases made the pizzas leap from their plates and in her pulsating composition Sonny — dedicated to the great Rollins, her girlhood inspiration — she brought all the Americas and Europe into one swinging amalgam.

The maestro of an 18-strong orchestra of seasoned male musicians Maria Schneider conducted her succession of tone poems of rural Minnesota life and nature at the Cadogan Hall with an intense timbral consciousness, creating in her music a transcendental US released from its curses – its guns, its capital, its brutal foreign follies and greed — in her compelling invocations of butterflies, plants and skies in tunes like The Monarch and the Milkweed and Nimbus.

And what to say of the Japanese master pianist Hiromi, born in Hamamatsu in 1979? With her New York bassist Anthony Jackson and London drummer Simon Phillips surrounded by a virtual steelworks of cymbals, her hands became an impressionistic blur across the keys, so astonishingly fast did she play.

Her tune Spark was more a conflagration of sound combining a frantic harpsichordal ring, a visitation of Jerry Lee Lewis with snatches of Ellington and C Jam Blues conjoined with Great Balls of Fire and her own very inspired pianism of deep and penetrative power.

The German pianist Julia Hulsmann loves the music of her compatriot Kurt Weill and with her quartet, including the rasping and vocalistic English trumpeter Tom Arthurs and US singer Theo Bleckmann, she created an arresting ECM album of Weill tunes, A Clear Midnight.

At the Barbican’s Milton Court they played its tracks live, with piercingly original versions of Speak Low, Mack the Knife and a tenderly-conceived instrumental reading of Alabama Song, played with an ironical lyricism. Walt Whitman’s Beat , Beat Drums, also found its way into jazz performance in a strident, pounding arrangement.

Not that the men of jazz weren’t raising roofs too. At the Rich Mix on the festival’s first night The Sons of Kemet blew and pulsed into Bethnal Green with their boiling tenor saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings, the rampaging tuba man Theon Cross and two potent drummers, Seb Rochford and Tom Skinner in an incendiary session.

And at King’s Place, veteran Norwegian bassist Arild Andersen celebrated his entry into septuagenaria by leading a young sextet into a celebration of the great bassist Charles Mingus’s legendary 1963 Oslo concert.

As the tunes spun out of their bones and Andersen’s huge bass sound resonated through King’s Cross with Mingus anthems like So Long Eric, Better Get Hit in Your Soul and the righteously caustic Fables of Faubus, the delving Norseman’s spanning and thudding hands signalled the anthems’ rebirth.

It was as Mingus would have lived and loved it, full of thought, resistance and fully expressed artistry.