And it means being prepared to fall crashing to the ground at any moment for the sake of music.

For members of the audience, it's not quite so arduous. Seizing the moment generally means showing up and sitting down . . .not much to ask in return for transcendence.

As luck would have it, today is an ideal day to do some moment seizing and if you are within striking distance of the capital, there is a day of excellent music stretching before you.

The Diversions Festival in Temple Bar continues this afternoon with a joint performance from Irish Balkan groovers Yurodny and Cretan visitors Myriada. Led by saxophonist and composer Nick Roth, Yurodny are one of the standard bearers for eastern European music in Ireland, and Roth has engineered this collaboration with Greek four-piece Myriada, featuring vocalist Maria Koti backed by a traditional Greek line-up including the ancient lyra instrument.

They take the stage in Meeting House Square at 4pm today.

Just up the road, barely an hour later, the Kaboom Collective show gets started in the cool surroundings of No 4 Dame Lane.

As hotly recommended here last week, groups led by guitarists Tommy Halferty and Sami Moukadem will explore links between jazz and, respectively, the music of Brazil and Lebanon.

Then at 8pm in Dun Laoghaire's Pavilion Theatre, vocalist and actor Susannah de Wrixon will raise the curtain on her new jazz cabaret show, Roasts Toasts and Tributes. Backed as always by pianist Jim Doherty and his trio, de Wrixon's new show will feature music from what she calls the Alternative American Song Book, including songs by Suzanne Vega and Randy Newman. As a former Nuala, de Wrixon is as funny as she is musically talented and topics under examination for the night include marriage, horticulture, cross dressing and the French.

And finally tonight, in JJ Smyths, Irish guitarist (and, latterly, bassist) Simon Jermyn unveils his Trot a Mouse group, featuring New York alto saxophonist Loren Stillman.

Jermyn has spent the last few years travelling and studying and, in the process, he has forged important musical alliances with musicians at the forefront of jazz.

None more so than with Stillman, who is attracting much favourable comment amongst New York's musicians these days. He has been described by no less a grandee than John Abercrombie as "Lee Konitz on steroids" and he returns to New York after the Dublin gig to play with the great Paul Motian's group at the Village Vanguard.

If today is just a little too spontaneous for you, try Phil Ware's Summit series at JJ Smyths, which comes to an end tomorrow night after a superb run. The idea was to pair Ware's trio with a different soloist every week and, over the last year or so, this talented trio have found common ground with pretty much every leading jazz musician on the Irish scene, including guitarists Louis Stewart and Tommy Halferty, saxophonists Richie Buckley and Brendan Doyle and vocalists Cormac Kenevey and Honor Heffernan. Rumour has it many of them will be there tomorrow to celebrate the end of the series.

The series has also served as an extended rehearsal for the trio's superb debut album In Our Own Time (see review) which was released earlier this year and can be purchased at their website or at the Summit gigs.