IT is not only in my own little niche in the world of arts journalism that we worry too much about labelling. By some unspoken rule, the Three to See at the front of our Arts magazine should, if possible, encompass a breadth of categories of the range of stuff we try to cover inside. My conversations with our freelance contributors often revolve around how an article should be headed up as much as what the content of it should be. A previous editor-in-chief of these titles used to talk authoritatively about "entry points" for the reader, that entice into new areas of experience within our pages. By which he meant stuff that wasn't the writing.

I am certain these conversations – the sort that, even as you are having them you are also thinking "can this really be important enough to deserve the amount of time it is taking up" – happen in every field of life that has a public-facing dimension, but the marketing of the boldest, freshest work in the arts presents particular, and probably entirely unavoidable, difficulties. Labour leader and Lord Provost of Glasgow Pat Lally was adamant that the word "international" appeared in the title of new cultural endeavours in his city, even when its inclusion was superfluous. So Glasgow Royal Concert Hall became so only after Her Majesty happily smiled upon it, and Glasgow Jazz Festival has just recently settled on the more comfortable, abbreviated form of its name. At board level in that organisation recently, I can confidentially reveal, the conversation of the sort I described above has occasionally revolved around the word "jazz".

The full programme for the 2017 edition of Glasgow Jazz Festival (June 21-25, www.jazzfest.co.uk) is now available for you consideration, and while it might be said to embrace soul and rock elements, the music this year (which remembers Ella Fitzgerald, Buddy Rich, Thelonious Monk and Art Blakey) is pretty unarguably in the "jazz" bag. However, in the same city we have recently had the opportunity to hear much music that shares many characteristics with the most progressive thinking of players and composers from that world.

Conductor Ilan Volkov chose the geological term Tectonics, often deployed by my colleague Michael Tumelty in his reviews, to title the weekend of sonic exploration with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra that he curates with music event producer Alasdair Campbell. Much of last weekend's programme was more about moments of delicacy rather than anything earth-moving – the remarkable installation in the City Halls Recital Room by Pierre Berthet and Rie Nakajima was full of them – but the huge attendance two packed days of experimentation attracted suggests that the accuracy of the labelling was not in any way an issue. In fact words themselves played a crucial role in some of Sunday afternoon's programme, whether batted across tables in a game of verbal ping-pong by James Saunders and Tim Parkinson in the Grand Hall, or deployed in more dramatic and narrative fashion by Ash Reid and Ilana Halperin in the Old Fruitmarket.

Counterflows is the name of the long weekend of global musical investigation that Campbell programmes with Fielding Hope of London's Cafe Oto, and which also attracted capacity audiences to venues across Glasgow just over a month ago. Again it happily embraces artists with a vast range of different practice, with "music-making" probably, but not exclusively, their only relationship. The inclusion of Richard Youngs' recipe for Sweet Potato Flatbreads with a red pepper and ground almond dip in the programme booklet was in no way incongruous.

Cathie Boyd's Cryptic organisation uses the line "sonic art for the visually minded" to describe its Sonica festival, for which it has sometimes been gently mocked. I'm not sure it helps much to describe the unique experience of Stuart Macpherson's composition Flight in the cloisters, quadrangles and chapel of Glasgow University a week ago, which Cryptic produced. But then if I say that the bassist was joined by violinist Greg Lawson, cellist Su-a Lee, recordings of migratory geese played through remarkable hand-held loudspeakers and Dr David Borthwick talking about the Barnacle Goose, those bare bones will not really impart much of the experience either. Once again, though, I was in the company of a healthy crowd of people eager to give their own ears and other senses a work-out, regardless of the branding.