Most eagerly anticipated will be US trumpeter Dave Douglas with his audio-visual Keystone project who opens the festival on Friday night on the Mermaid Arts Centre stage. Douglas is widely praised not only for his instrumental prowess but also for his abilities as a composer and a band leader. He is adept at finding the links between the past and the future, keeping alive the legacies of musicians as diverse as Miles Davis, Stravinsky, and Stevie Wonder, without ever slipping into pastiche. Alongside his regular quintet, the trumpeter leads various side projects, and even finds time to run his own record label, Greenleaf.

Keystone is a hipper, younger unit than the quintet, with more of an atmosphere of the street about it. The band's name and its music is inspired by the silent comic Fatty Arbuckle and the compositions were written as if they are scores for Arbuckle's movies. The six-piece band, which features saxophonist Marcus Strickland and DJ Olive on turntables, improvises along with the films on stage, with the results ranging from the delicate to the raucous to the bizarre.

Douglas is already one of the most influential musicians of his generation, and really shouldn't be missed, particularly not by anyone who wants to boast twenty years from now that they saw him in Bray when he was young.

Saturday night's headliner at the Mermaid is Danish guitarist Pierre Dorge and his New Jungle Orchestra, an anarchic collective of brass instruments that combines irrepressible humour with unclassifiable music of the highest order, and has become one of Denmark's best known musical exports. Sunday night sees the return to Ireland of the extraordinary French clarinetist Luis Sclavis and his group L'Imparfait des Langues. Leading light of the European free movement, Sclavis played a concert in Vicar Street two years ago that is still being talked about.

As well as the Mermaid concerts, the festival is running a range of smaller stages, and there is something for everyone happening about the town over the weekend: US bassist Ben Allison, who records for the hip New York Palmetto label, brings his quartet to the Esplanade Hotel on Sunday evening; the remarkable Indian slide-guitarist Debashish Bhattacharya and his brother Subhasis play in the town hall early on Sunday evening; and UK samba merchants Sirius B get the world music stage at Katie's moving late on Sunday night.

As always, there is a strong presence from the Dublin scene in Bray: White Rocket support Douglas in the Mermaid on Friday night; Hammond organ trio Organics plus special guests play a one-off invitational gig in the Esplanade Hotel on Saturday night; drummer Conor Guilfoyle's peerless Havana Son purvey some of the best Cuban music this side of the Atlantic on the world music stage late on Saturday night; audience favourites the North Strand Klezmer Band play even later on Saturday night in the Heather House; and guitarist Daniel Jacobsen's ZoiD play the late night slot on Sunday night.

RTE's Lyric FM will be recording all the main concerts to be aired later in the year but this is no excuse for not getting down to Bray to hear them live.