One of my first reviewing jobs - and I must have been a silver-tongued young news-pup to persuade my employers it was required - was covering the Edinburgh Jazz Festival in the days when it was a circuit of participating capital city pubs and the music was chiefly of the traditional variety that goes down particularly well with a pint of ale.

A few years later I was involved with a largely volunteer-run jazz-promoting network that brought more modern jazz to venues like the Third Eye in Glasgow, which led to an invitation to join the inaugural board of the nascent Glasgow Jazz Festival, where I was a very junior member, surrounded by businessmen with sponsorship clout and city agency officials. Those were buccaneering days when the festival brought Miles Davis to the SECC and created the Old Fruitmarket venue in a neglected Merchant City space adjoining the City Halls.

Last weekend felt like reliving the best bits of all that, and not just because the pop-up Rio Club, the venue this year's Glasgow Jazz Festival created in the basement of Merchant City Square, happened to serve a fine pint of the craft beer of which I am currently rather fond. Conviviality was part of the mix though, as was the business of dashing between venues to catch sets at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall and the O2 ABC, as well as along the length of Candleriggs, from Wild Cabaret to the Ramshorn, by way of the Rio and the City Halls complex. Festival director Jill Rodger wore a pedometer for the five days, which recorded that she walked 35 miles, without leaving the same city block.

When I was invited to rejoin the board of Glasgow Jazz Festival a few years ago, it was not in the best financial shape and, without meaning any criticism of the volunteer directors who steered the ship in the intervening period, it is not inaccurate to state that it was largely the single-mindedness and self-sacrifice of Rodger, who worked with the festival in an administrative capacity since those buccaneering days, that kept it afloat. So it is to her, and her enthusiastic young team of associates, that much of the credit must go for the unqualified success of this year's event, which sets the festival up for a grand celebration of its 30th year. A programme that covered the broadest spectrum of the music, and catered for the widest possible audience, was rewarded with good houses in all its venues, as well as that indefinable sense of a real "vibe" in the area in which it was headquartered, a last-minute free outdoor stage across the road from the Rio Club winning some fine weather and attracting new recruits to the jazz audience.

But of course Glasgow Jazz Festival would also not still be here without the faith shown in it by the city council, funding the longest-running arts event on the civic calendar and by Creative Scotland, who not only fund the festival but also made it a crucial interest-free loan that enabled it to trade out of its deficit, paying back the money on schedule and going into this year's event with balanced books. It is much too complex to go into here, and probably privileged information, but some of the festival's difficulties began in meeting the expectations of an earlier commercial sponsor, a useful lesson in how philanthropy can have strings attached, and how essential public money always is to the arts.

But if brewers Williams Brothers want to add some pounds to their fine pints to help the 2016 party go well, I am sure Jill Rodger will be pleased to hear from them.