Paul C,
I seem to remeber getting into Jack programming using a Jack module for python... just looked it up from my backup of programming projects, "pyjack" is the name of the module, i was using version 0.1 at the time. It allows capture / playback of "standard" python arrays of floats.
Project is currently located at:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/py-jack/files/py-jack/ and is at version 0.5.2.
HTH, -Harry