When Uri Caine, the big, rumpled Philadelphia pianist, toured his jazz treatment of Mahler's most celebrated melodies a couple of years ago, some of the late composer's devotees told him that what he was doing was particularly indecent because Mahler was dead and couldn't even retaliate. Caine's octet (including a roof-raising gospel singer, trumpet, sax and turntables) launched its UK tour this week with a British premiere of the leader's version of JS Bach's Goldberg Variations. It was the last night of a Norfolk and Norwich arts festival that had begun two weeks previously with a straight account of the same work.

On his Mahler project, a driving idea in the whole thing was that Mahler had taken many melodic motifs from vernacular settings and the jazz band could be used to restore the spontaneity, idiosyncrasy and rough edges to the source material. With the Goldberg Variations, Caine has inclined more toward pretty respectfully delivered accounts (often in duet with his classical violinist Joyce Hamman) that shine like separated beacons over the turbulent landscape in between, his piano sound growing freer and splashier around her imperturbably elegant delivery as the show went on.

But for the most part, the real departures from the Goldberg stemmed from an even looser sequence of tangentially-related notions than occurred with the Mahler. Bach's use of the dance-forms of his time led Caine to use the dance-forms of his own - and some of the most exuberant and exhilarating passages in the 90-minute unbroken set were raucous salsa explosions, sinister tangos, jubilant New Orleans stomps. In some hands, a venture like this could simply be an uncomprehending enforced cohabitation between utterly dissimilar sensibilities - but Uri Caine's passion, wit, expertise and shrewd sense of when to bend his beautiful borrowings and when to leave them be, makes a triumph out of it.

• Uri Caine is at the Wardrobe, Leeds (0113 245 5570), tonight, then tours.