The Melbourne International Jazz Festival kicked off on Saturday. Tonight’s highlights include New York’s hip-hop inspired Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, drummer Jim Black’s AlasNoAxis and traffic. Yes, traffic.

Acoustic ecologist Anthony Magen is leading “Evening Sound Walks” as part of this year’s festival, designed to put people in touch with the everyday soundscape around them. The walks highlight, Magen says, street life’s “subtle rhythms, the ebbs and flows, the way traffic does actually move — physically move — but then sonically how it shifts and has crescendos and troughs”.

“It helps place people back into the landscape — not just moving across it or on top of it but actually being in it, and sound is immersive in it’s very nature,” he told Crikey.

The walks aim to get people to tune in to the “annoying” noises they would otherwise tune out, and highlight the improvised nature and the rhythms street sounds share with jazz. Running most nights for the duration of the festival, they are one of several free events offered as part of Australia’s premier celebration of the genre.

If you’re on your way to work this week and you notice a motley collection of people in Federation Square singing and humming, it’s not a flash mob or the Hare Krishnas in plain clothes. It’s another free event — Sonic Showers — described on the festival’s website as being “like a stint of Tai-Chi”. For those who prefer their sound appreciation in a slightly more traditional format, this year’s international acts include Sonny Rollins, Ron Carter Trio, Tim Berne’s Los Totopos and a joint performance between Charlemagne Palestine and Tony Conrad.

The festival line-up also brings together the best of Australia’s own jazz scene, including Sydney’s James Morrison, Brisbane vocalist Katie Noonan and locals The Raah Project and Paul Williamson. Oh, and a show by those other veterans of Australian performance — the Play School gang, who will put something on at the Town Hall Sunday and Monday to cater for the (much) younger set.

Whether you subscribe to the view of late jazz drummer Art Blakey that “jazz washes away the dust of every day life” or you’re interested in turning an inquisitive ear to that dust (and traffic), the festival is worth a peek.

The details: The 2011 Melbourne International Jazz Festival is at various venues until Sunday.